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Friday Flash Fun!
(disclaimer: not Friday)
posted by Bonzai at 9:20 PM PST - 30 comments

♪ "I know Darth Vader's really got you annoyed, but remember: if you kill him then you'll be unemployed...." ♫ (ML-Weird-YT)
posted by zarq at 8:10 PM PST - 24 comments

Burundi's election, in three acts. It was literally no surprise that Burundi’s president Pierre Nkurunziza won reelection on Monday. He was, after all, the only candidate. [more inside]
posted by lullaby at 7:17 PM PST - 5 comments

World Cup is it over yet? 'cuz this is not going to end well.
posted by HuronBob at 6:53 PM PST - 70 comments

Fifteen years ago this week, programmer Ron Britvich launched version 1.0 of Active Worlds. Started as an autonomous project of Worlds, Inc. (a spinoff of educational gamesmaker Knowledge Adventure), Active Worlds was one of the first and most ambitious attempts to create a 3D virtual community on the web. Built on the architecture of Britvich's Worlds Chat beta, Active Worlds debuted in the form of Alphaworld, a sunny green infinite plane open to public building. In its opening years Alphaworld experienced a land rush of construction, resulting in an anarchic starfish sprawl larger than the state of California. A sister company, Circle of Fire, was soon founded to craft additional themed hubs, and once individual ownership of worlds became possible the AW community spawned a veritable universe of hundreds of worlds. Although the company has seen its ups and downs since those heady times and its fortunes have slowly dwindled, the Active Worlds platform survives to this day. Look inside for a simple guide on how to log in to the (free) service, rundowns of the best worlds, links to essays analyzing the program's legacy, and other content summing up its venerable community. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 5:39 PM PST - 18 comments

BBS Documentary is now online to watch for free. Watch all 8 heartwarming, hilarious parts of (mefite) Jason Scott's doc here, under a Creative Commons license! (long long ago previously)
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 5:35 PM PST - 35 comments

For your 4th of July enjoyment: 10 Exceedingly Patriotic American Comic Heroes. Given the overlap between the Golden Age of superheroes and the beginning of WWII it should be no suprise that there are so many patriotically themed superheroes. Probably the first was The Shield ("G-Man Extraordinary"), who eventually faded away to be an occasional character in Archie comics, followed by the revolutiionary war themed Minute Man. But the most enduring of all would be Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's creation Captain America, whose first comic sold just under a million copies and featured Cap doing the most patriotic thing of all: Punching Adolf Hitler in the jaw.
posted by Artw at 2:46 PM PST - 37 comments

When a person graduates high school as one of the top students, all sorts of grand predictions are made for the person's future. But how many of them end up doing the things predicted of them? The Buffalo News did a feature in 2007 on what the top students in the Buffalo area from 1987 ended up doing after high school. Some of them have done remarkable things, while others have made their mark in smaller ways, all are interesting in their own way.
posted by reenum at 2:23 PM PST - 57 comments

How America got its name: The suprising story of an obscure scholar, an adventurer’s letter, and a pun.
posted by homunculus at 1:47 PM PST - 33 comments

"The Declaration of Independence in American," by H.L. Mencken. "When things get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody." Why we did what we did. In American, so everyone can understand.
posted by John of Michigan at 1:05 PM PST - 26 comments

Full on double rainbow all the way across the sky! (SLYT)
posted by domnit at 12:52 PM PST - 57 comments

Entanglement. A flash game: rotate tiles to make the longest line. [more inside]
posted by maxwelton at 12:44 PM PST - 23 comments

John Milbank and Katherine Pickstock are interviewed about Radical Orthodoxy [more inside]
posted by superiorchicken at 12:40 PM PST - 32 comments

Who knew that dams worsen global warming? Long ignored "run of river" or streaming hydro power now offers an alternative by avoiding a large reservoir. [more inside]
posted by Brian B. at 12:29 PM PST - 17 comments

Pounds Sterling to Dollars: Historical Conversion of Currency Click here to read an explanation of the calculations.
posted by Fizz at 12:17 PM PST - 15 comments

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) has been around since 1988, and discussed several times on metafilter. It has been used as a communication medium, a news source, and now, as a programming language.
posted by grandsham at 9:16 AM PST - 68 comments

A movie theater experience absolutely anywhere! Take it on a long commute, on the plane, or even on a camping trip.
posted by gman at 8:01 AM PST - 84 comments

"1945-1998" is a multimedia artwork by Isao Hashimoto that documents over 2000 nuclear explosions -- mostly tests -- on earth since the closing days of World War II. It starts slowly, but give it time, because it ends up looking like the 4th of July. [more inside]
posted by fourcheesemac at 6:29 AM PST - 54 comments

In the late 90s EMI's Songbook Series released an album, "Where Were You When The Fun Stopped" with tracks chosen by author Hunter S. Thompson along with detailed liner notes. Since you can't get the cool notes or photos, why not enjoy Hunter's country and folk flavored taste at your July 4th revelry of choice? Ballad of Thunder Road - Robert Mitchum : I Smell A Rat - Howlin' Wolf Big Momma Thornton : Spirit In The Sky - Norman Greenbaum : The Hula-Hula Boys - Warren Zevon : Maggie May - Rod Stewart : The Wild Side of Life / It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels - Hank Thompson feat. Kitty Wells & Tanya Tucker : Will The Circle Be Unbroken - Nitty Gritty Dirt Band : Mr Tambourine Man - Bob Dylan : Walk On The Wild Side - Lou Reed : If I Had A Boat - Lyle Lovett : Stars On The Water - Rodney Crowell : Carmelita - Flaco Jiminez feat. Dwight Yoakam : Why Don't We Get Drunk - Jimmy Buffett : American Pie - Don McClean : White Rabbit - Jefferson Airplane : The Weight - The Band : Melissa - The Allman Brothers Band : Battle Hymn of the Republic - Herbie Mann (cover) [more inside]
posted by The Whelk at 6:14 AM PST - 32 comments

In Sometimes Making Something leads to Nothing (video), the artist Francis Alys pushes a block of ice through Mexico City until it melts.
In When Faith Moves Mountains, (video) he convinces 500 Peruvian students to move a huge sand dune a few feet.
He walks through Mexico City waving a handgun and he drizzles green paint in Palestine.
Also, he walks into tornados (video).
The Tate Modern opens an exhibition on Francis Alys.
posted by vacapinta at 3:22 AM PST - 25 comments

The Elvis World Cup, a competition for Elvis impersonators, takes place in Cardiff this weekend. Some say that if impersonators keep increasing at the rate they are today, by 2020 one in four people on the planet will be an Elvis impersonator. Swedish Elvis. Chinese Elvis. Jewish Elvis. Lady Elvis. Black Elvis. Lesbian Elvis. Child Elvis. Mexican Elvis. The King, an impersonator who covers the songs of dead people in an Elvis stylee.
posted by mippy at 1:03 AM PST - 17 comments