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The ghost in the machine - Army PSYOPS recruitment video appears (Army Times). The Army has a PSYOPS group, and they need people, and on their YouTube channel they have posted a recruitment video that in three minutes creates a quite harrowing mood. They say that they will show who’s pulling the strings, and they do, dark silhouettes, of people here and there, maybe around the world, maybe here, but all faceless, and in dark spaces. All centered on a Fleischer Brothers cartoon of Koko the Clown, rotoscoped from a film of Cab Calloway, turning into the ghost in the machine. But you know, that might be an interesting job?
posted by njohnson23 at 8:07 PM PST - 42 comments

"I’ve no fixed place on account of I’m often late from my shift." "Churched" by Maria Farrell is a short story that is about, among other things, "the marooned generations of Irish in London – people who came over from the 1950s onward, pushed out by economic and social stagnation, and who rarely got home again." And resolving a little mystery about a man who starts acting oddly in church. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 6:01 PM PST - 5 comments

The truth is, the Marcos victory was largely a democratic outcome in the narrow electoral sense, and the challenge for progressives is to understand why the runaway majority of the electorate voted to bring an unrepentant thieving family back to power after 36 years. How could democracy produce such a wayward outcome? [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 5:02 PM PST - 19 comments

!!! (chk chk chk) reinterprets a familiar REM tune in a way you wouldn't expect.
posted by Kitteh at 2:43 PM PST - 26 comments

Matthew McCormack describes encountering a delivery robot in the woods. That is all.
posted by elkevelvet at 2:16 PM PST - 17 comments

David Cronenberg goes to a video store and talks about some of his favorite movies. (23-minute video, includes a few NSFW film clips)
posted by Gerald Bostock at 2:01 PM PST - 8 comments

The Calgary Stampede has released its lineup of midway food for 2022. From Bad-Breath Lemonade ("ice-cold lemonade with a smooth, delicious garlic and caramelized onion finish") to Kraft Dinner soft serve ("the familiar taste of macaroni and cheese combined with a creamy coolness of soft-serve ice cream), stunt foods are well-represented along with twists on old classics, such as Nanaimo bar mini donuts ("mini donuts topped with chocolate syrup, vanilla custard, shaved sweet coconut, and a choice of coconut crème").
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:34 PM PST - 40 comments

A number of restaurants are betting that Americans want to get gussied up again, but not everyone is thrilled about the fashion screening. “There are rules and then there are rules,” she said. “You know when Tom Fontana comes here, he is a neighborhood regular, he wrote ‘Oz,’ he is a good friend of our house. Tom comes, he forgets a jacket, we will close one eye.”
posted by geoff. at 1:32 PM PST - 85 comments

The young Yankees fan who lost his autographs [ESPN]
posted by chavenet at 11:10 AM PST - 13 comments

The war continues. The illegal and criminal Russian invasion of Ukraine nears the third month of fighting. It's not going super well for them, with minimal gains in the east and significant withdrawals around Karkhiv, towards the Russian border. Ukraine counterattacks are expected to continue. The USA and many other countries continues to give billions in support and weapons. But Ukraine has suffered intensely as well, losing irreplaceable people and devestating economic blows. [more inside]
posted by Jacen at 9:49 AM PST - 614 comments

SLYT, ~2 min. Metal spheres swinging and bouncing off each other in increasingly inventive ways, all synchronized to music -- idk, it's just a lot of fun to watch!
posted by mpark at 8:31 AM PST - 25 comments

Art professor Kim Beil in Lapham's Quarterly on the advent of color photography and the complicated questions of the perception of color. Color is among the most challenging aspects of our experience to describe. Spectrophotometers and colorimeters can quantify light waves, yet their measurements have little impact on our feeling for color. As the philosopher Zeno Vendler put it, “Vincent van Gogh loved the color yellow—and certainly not because of its wavelength.” Color is infamous for its variability in language and perception. How can we know that what we are seeing is the same as what someone else sees? How can we separate what we are seeing from the thing itself? Or, as Ludwig Wittgenstein asked in his Remarks on Colour, “Where do we draw the line here between logic and experience?” In the Remarks, written the year before his death in 1951, the philosopher’s thoughts about color invariably lead back to the study of philosophy. What things are knowable? How are they known? What can be determined through philosophical reasoning? Wittgenstein reflected, “Colors are a stimulus to philosophizing.”
posted by briank at 7:32 AM PST - 16 comments

While I was scrolling deep in the trenches of TikTok one morning, I had a visceral reaction to a video—with what I can only describe as chaotic good energy—about a design trend called “cluttercore.” Taking off during the pandemic, the hashtag has reached 49.6 million views on TikTok (and 23,703 tags on Instagram), and spawned more videos than any of my devices can load. I honestly had a hard time looking away from my screen because I saw so much of myself within this aesthetic. From Sydney Gore in Architectural Digest. See also Vanessa Brown's piece for The Conversation and Olivia Harvey's take for Apartment Therapy.
posted by Bella Donna at 7:19 AM PST - 96 comments