July 25, 2013

A man of flesh and bone, who cannot be stopped!

Legie is a depressing Czech adventure game/dungeon crawler. The only record of it left is this Let's Play.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 11:40 PM PST - 19 comments

"I have no reason to expect compensation"

How DC Contracts Work. Mark Waid, author of Superman: Birthright (drawn on heavily for the recent film Man of Steel), "explains how professionals are generally compensated for working on company-owned characters".
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 4:40 PM PST - 46 comments

Pyongyang Express

The Defector: Escape From North Korea, an interactive documentary. The Trailer. via. Flash required. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 4:37 PM PST - 7 comments

Class Dublin Taxi Driver

One sunny summer day in Dublin, pub drinkers spill out onto the streets. Blocking traffic. And dancing. With taxi drivers. The taxi driver is part-time DJ Wayne Karney. His dance partner is Andrea Pappin, spokesperson for the Irish Presidency of the EU 2013.
posted by DarlingBri at 3:40 PM PST - 15 comments

"I hope no one's been killed because they'll be on my conscience"

Spain has declared three days of mourning following a deadly train crash that killed at least 80 people and injured many more. [more inside]
posted by randomnity at 3:36 PM PST - 90 comments

Mouseunculus

Mouseunculus: How The Brain Draws A Little You. [Via]
posted by homunculus at 3:35 PM PST - 16 comments

What I want, what I really really want.

Frenchmen dance a Spice Girls medley ...in high heels.
posted by The Whelk at 2:48 PM PST - 21 comments

Joe Engel (1893 - 1969): the Barnum of Baseball

At the age of 19, Joe Engel started pitching for the Washington Senators in 1912 (Google books preview), but he only played one game per year in 1917, '19, and '20, due to arm injuries. Unimpressed with his performance, Manager Clark Griffith shooed Engel off to swap himself for someone from the minors who could play ball. Engel sent back the catcher Edward Patrick ("Ed" or "Patsy") Gharrity. Gharrity turned out to be so good that Engel was hired to scout for Washington, and later manage the Chattanooga Lookouts, then the farm team for Washington. It was there in Chattanooga that Engel's true career in baseball took off, where he was given the title "Barnum of Baseball." [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 2:46 PM PST - 6 comments

If we can't protect the school, you can be well sure we'll avenge it

Burka Avenger is a new cartoon series (in urdu) scheduled to start running in Pakistan in early August. Created by the British-Pakistani pop singer Haroon, the series features a ninjaburqa-clad, pen-and-book-wielding superheroine / mild-mannered non-burqa-wearing schoolteacher who fights for her school against Taliban-like baddies (short interviews with Haroon and a slightly worried media analyst).
posted by elgilito at 2:32 PM PST - 11 comments

the maps, the rain, the pills, the place

Night Stroll by Tao Tajima. A visually stunning nighttime display of lights and shapes across the streets of Tokyo. [via / epilepsy warning] [more inside]
posted by Wonton Cruelty at 1:36 PM PST - 6 comments

Life is like a hurricane, here in Duckburg

Scientifically accurate DuckTales. (SLYT, NSFW)
posted by Chrysostom at 1:21 PM PST - 67 comments

cloud rap is sort of the chillest of raps

Depending on who you ask, Cloud Rap either is "the best shit happening right now" or it doesn't exist. If you ask Killscreen, the genre owes a lot to Japanese Role Playing Games. But according to Philly cloud-rapper Lushlife, "All Rap Is Cloud Rap." [more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:11 PM PST - 45 comments

Should summer vacation be abolished?

There are few more cherished nostrums in American life than the importance of equal opportunities. Unfortunately, one of them is the importance of summer vacation... A 2011 RAND literature review concluded that the average student “loses” about one month’s worth of schooling during a typical summer vacation, with the impact disproportionately concentrated among low-income students. “While all students lose some ground in mathematics over the summer,” RAND concluded, “low-income students lose more ground in reading while their higher-income peers may even gain.” Most distressingly, the impact is cumulative. Poor kids tend to start school behind their middle-class peers, and then they fall further behind each and every summer, giving teachers and principals essentially no chance of closing the gap during the school year. [more inside]
posted by bookman117 at 1:03 PM PST - 137 comments

Rape Joke

Rape Joke, a poem by Patricia Lockwood (previously).
posted by mahershalal at 12:40 PM PST - 89 comments

Our illmatic stripy hero and his glucose-heavy sidekick

Zebra Face and friends have Rumbles In The Tumbles, and also Cloud Trouble. [more inside]
posted by doiheartwentyone at 12:33 PM PST - 3 comments

Best of Breed Solution

Are human beings the descendants of chimpanzee/pig hybrids? This radical theory might seem easy to disprove, but "decent arguments against the hybrid origins theory are surprisingly hard to find."
posted by chrchr at 12:13 PM PST - 134 comments

Santa's Little Helper

Sam Simon, an original developer for The Simpsons, is still listed on the opening credits despite leaving the show in 1993. He once told a magazine that he continues to make "tens of millions" of dollars a year from his contributions. In 2012 he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He has recently announced that he will give away his entire fortune to charity. The Sam Simon Foundation.
posted by girlmightlive at 12:00 PM PST - 17 comments

Beer Labels in Motion

Does what it says, on the tin. Or bottle. Or glass.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:22 AM PST - 18 comments

she would often either fall asleep or cry after making an image

"Arresting Portraits of Children in Water" by Wendy Sacks [Some nudity.]
posted by andoatnp at 11:02 AM PST - 19 comments

A talkative porcupine eats a banana

Feeling down? Watching a talkative porcupine eat a banana might cheer you up! (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by elmer benson at 10:26 AM PST - 69 comments

The price of security

PreCheck, a new program instituted by the TSA, will allow passengers to keep their shoes, jackets and belts during screening, as well as allow laptop computers and approved liquids to remain in bags for a fee of $85.
posted by Omon Ra at 9:59 AM PST - 225 comments

Crime is driven by proximity and opportunity

There’s no such thing as “black-on-black” crime.
posted by latkes at 9:41 AM PST - 49 comments

Call Me Jazzy

Call Me Maybe, 1920s style (SLYT)
posted by Gelatin at 8:28 AM PST - 57 comments

Questions. Morbidity. Incept dates.

Detroit, New Orleans, Oakland... some of the safer places in America to live! Sure, big cities might have more murders per capita... but residents in large cities are *MUCH* safer when it comes to injury deaths than those living in more rural parts of America, according to a new study in The Annals of Emergency Medicine.
"Cars, guns and drugs are the unholy trinity causing the majority of injury deaths . . . Although the risk of homicide is higher in big cities, the risk of unintentional injury death is 40 percent higher in the most rural areas than in the most urban. And overall, the rate of unintentional injury dwarfs the risk of homicide, with the rate of unintentional injury more than 15 times that of homicide among the entire population."
posted by markkraft at 8:03 AM PST - 72 comments

Gnomeland

Gnomeland "New Hampshire's Premiere Gnome Destination!" Also known as, what happens when friends play a prank on you and install 500 handpainted gnomes in and around your house. Full Flickr set [via mefi projects]
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 7:34 AM PST - 30 comments

Sicker, sadder world

"High school was a lot like the Civil War: it lasted four years, you were defined by what you wore, and I lost 1 in 10 of my friends to gangrene."

Daria: The Live-Action Movie, starring Aubrey Plaza. [more inside]
posted by Horace Rumpole at 7:22 AM PST - 85 comments

Android hack found

"All Android applications contain cryptographic signatures, which Android uses to determine if the app is legitimate and to verify that the app hasn’t been tampered with or modified. This vulnerability makes it possible to change an application’s code without affecting the cryptographic signature of the application – essentially allowing a malicious author to trick Android into believing the app is unchanged even if it has been." [more inside]
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 6:26 AM PST - 55 comments

The Doom that came to Doom

The Doom that Came to Atlantic City was billed as something of a Monopoly meets Cthulhu. It was a Kickstarter that got great reviews and raised over $120K. Then, suddenly, it was over. [more inside]
posted by graymouser at 6:15 AM PST - 100 comments

Top Myths of Renaissance Martial Arts

The diverse range of misconceptions and erroneous beliefs within historical fencing studies today is considerable. But there are perhaps some myths that are more common, and more pervasive, than others. This webpage presents an ongoing project that will continually try in an informal and condensed manner to help address some of these mistaken beliefs.
posted by cthuljew at 5:24 AM PST - 39 comments

4. A robot must not scalp restaurant reservations

If you find it impossible to make restaurant reservations online it might be because you're competing against bots. A developer explains how it works and just how common it might be in San Francisco. [more inside]
posted by Foci for Analysis at 2:58 AM PST - 65 comments

A is for ... aah you guessed

So back in the early thirties the Soviets had a problem: how to combat adult illiteracy in a country where millions of peasants had never had been to so much as primary school? How do you get these people to learn the alphabet? Well, by making an adult illiteracy campaign into an adult illiteracy campaign using an erotic alphabet book designed by Sergei Merkurov.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:57 AM PST - 48 comments

Burp.

A new article in Nature warns that "the costs of a melting Arctic will be huge", thanks in part to the likely release of "a 50-gigatonne (Gt) reservoir of methane, stored in the form of hydrates" beneath the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, "either steadily over 50 years or suddenly". An abrupt release is "highly possible at any time", says Natalia Shakhova of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, who has observed plumes of methane up to a kilometre wide bubbling to the surface in the area. [more inside]
posted by rory at 2:42 AM PST - 66 comments

It's not a conspiracy, it's a business opportunity

Had enough government rhetoric? Tired of following the sheeple? Fed up with believing what THEY want you to believe? Maybe it's time to branch out and discover THE TRUTH.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:24 AM PST - 32 comments

« Previous day | Next day »