August 5, 2014

Squeeze those pips

“Hey,” I said to my boyfriend. “So I need to do something weird to your dick later.” I thought for a second and then added, “It’s for work,” as if that somehow made it better. My boyfriend nodded curiously. “It’s a grapefruit. I need to put a grapefruit on your dick. I’m sorry.”
Gabrielle Moss tries the grapefruit blowjob technique as recommended by Auntie Angel. NSFW. [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 11:46 PM PST - 136 comments

Would you like to choose Bellsprout as your starter?

Pokémon Zeta & Omicron are not ROM hacks. They are standalone fan-made Pokémon clones created with RPG Maker XP, featuring around 80 hours of gameplay, 2 regions with 12 gyms, a coherent storyline, "tons" of endgame content, Shadow Pokémon, Delta Pokémon, all 649 Pokémon through gen V, secret bases, mega evolutions, challenge modes (previously), and sometimes quirky dialogue. Though still in beta, it's a playable game [YT], patches to which have slowed. Each new version is posted to the sub-Reddit /r/pokemonzetaomicron.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 10:23 PM PST - 8 comments

password12345

Less than a year after 40 million credit and debit card records were stolen from Target's point of sale systems, the New York Times is reporting that "a Russian crime ring has amassed the largest known collection of stolen Internet credentials, including 1.2 billion user name and password combinations and more than 500 million email addresses." (Ars Technica, too)
posted by Chutzler at 10:15 PM PST - 104 comments

Beautifully creepy X-ray embroidery

Matthew Cox is a Philadelphia- based artist who embraces and joins a variety of media to produce several thematic series of work. Medical x-rays and embroidery, couture and crime, rubber stamps, short -story prose and paint all layer toward a darkly comic and anachronistic impression of the human condition in the twenty-first century. [more inside]
posted by Lexica at 9:05 PM PST - 3 comments

Gentle people with flowers in their hair

Flower Beards. Fuck Yeah Flower Beards! Street Test: "I’m getting a lot more eye contact than I usually do." Will It Beard?
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 6:49 PM PST - 47 comments

The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

How Ronald Reagan Used An 'Invisible Bridge' To Win Over Americans - "Rick Perlstein's new book describes how Reagan emerged as the leader of a potent political movement during the turbulent mid-'70s. He says the soul of Reagan's appeal was how he made people feel good." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 5:05 PM PST - 80 comments

You'll pourover these instructions, and be hard pressed for better ones!

Coffee Science: How to Make the Best Pourover Coffee at Home
"Most of the roasted coffee bean, about two thirds of the bean's mass, is insoluble cellulose. The other third is dissolvable in water. Of that soluble third, most of it is the good stuff, particularly various organic acids and sugars. The rest are longer-chain molecules that we associate with astringent and bitter tastes. Where we find the happy balance is at the 19-20% point, that is, if you extract the first 19-20% of the mass of the coffee, we tend to find the best flavor balance. More than that and you'll find those astringent and bitter flavors start to dominate. Less than that and you'll find the resulting flavors thin and unbalanced, and with lighter roasted coffees, unusually sour. Timing really is what makes or breaks your coffee brew."
[more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 3:39 PM PST - 97 comments

Helen DeWitt recounts dealing with her stalker

Read DeWitt's account here. "E’s landlord: ‘You’re a very attractive woman. He can’t help himself. I’m sorry you can’t live on your property.’" [more inside]
posted by zeusianfog at 3:01 PM PST - 227 comments

"Even Jay Silverheels knew it."

Why Do So Many People Pretend to be Native American?
posted by box at 2:38 PM PST - 147 comments

Paris Is Burning

Full Doc - 1:16:27 - slyt: "Paris Is Burning is a 1990 documentary film directed by Jennie Livingston. Filmed in the mid-to-late 1980s, it chronicles the ball culture of New York City and the African American, Latino, gay and transgender communities involved in it. Many members of the ball culture community consider Paris Is Burning to be an invaluable documentary of the end of the "Golden Age" of New York City drag balls, as well as a thoughtful exploration of race, class, and gender in America."
posted by marienbad at 2:20 PM PST - 25 comments

Elkhart, Indiana's payday, and the man behind it

What happens when a small town is bequeathed $150m?
posted by ellieBOA at 2:13 PM PST - 14 comments

neither hipster, nor corporate shill... its the Dishevelled Trivago Guy

what's with that guy? [more inside]
posted by St. Peepsburg at 2:10 PM PST - 131 comments

New York Girl Wins Kangaroo, Her First

Long before Mad Men, Forrest Gump, and coast-to-coast classic rock FM stations completed the transubstantiation of the 1960s from reality to legend, something stranger than fiction was burning the midnight oil in an old firehouse: The Socrates of San Francisco, Howard Luck Gossage, would change advertising--and the way we think about communication--forever. [more inside]
posted by HowardLuckGossage at 1:43 PM PST - 8 comments

how can she possibly buy apples with her limited food stamp budget?

what I learned after taking a homeless mother grocery shopping
posted by yeoz at 12:51 PM PST - 70 comments

there's nothing that is scientifically proven

(A theoretical physicist explains why) Science Is Not About Certainty [more inside]
posted by flex at 12:00 PM PST - 33 comments

I'll do something else … Probably, I'm thinking, carpentry.

British comedian and actor James Corden, probably best known as co-creator and co-star of the sitcom "Gavin & Stacey," is taking the seat vacated by Craig Ferguson on "The Late Late Show" at the end of this year. [more inside]
posted by jbickers at 11:51 AM PST - 89 comments

Was there a control group?

For an entire school year Hillsborough, New Jersey, educators undertook an experiment, asking: Is the iPad really the best device for interactive learning?
posted by exit at 11:48 AM PST - 51 comments

support, salvation, transformation, life

Recently I overheard a man say at a yoga class, "Yeah, well, you get two women together and it's like bitch central." I could have told him he only needed one, in fact, and that would be me, but it also made me realize how much people diminish and poo-poo the real power and strength of female friendship, especially between women, which is either supposed to descend into some kind of male lesbian love scene porn fantasy or be dismissed as meaningless or be re-written as a story of competition.

Here's the truth: friendships between women are often the deepest and most profound love stories, but they are often discussed as if they are ancillary, "bonus" relationships to the truly important ones. Women's friendships outlast jobs, parents, husbands, boyfriends, lovers, and sometimes children.
Transformation and Transcendence: The Power of Female Friendship, an essay by Emily Rapp (previously).
posted by divined by radio at 11:04 AM PST - 57 comments

Do not drive into smoke

The Worst Highways in America. "There are bad, bad roads in America. None have I-40's ability to warp time itself, and turn what should be a three-hour drive with traffic into a creeping space-time anomaly broken only by the words "hey, there's the exit for Bucksnort." I am convinced a person could extend their lifespan near infinitely and live to biblical ages provided they drove only on this stretch of I-40. No one will ever prove this, because no one would subject themselves to this even in the name of near-immortality. They would rather die, and wisely so."
posted by HumanComplex at 10:33 AM PST - 155 comments

The Digitized Medieval Manuscripts App

The DMMapp (Digitized Medieval Manuscripts App) is a website that links to more than 300 libraries in the world. Each one of these contains medieval manuscripts that can be browsed for free. The DMMapp is a product of Sexy Codicology, an independent project focused on medieval illuminated manuscripts and social media. It maintains a great blog about medieval manuscripts, especially those that are available online.
posted by jedicus at 10:28 AM PST - 6 comments

Consider, first, their absurd sartorial appurtenances

GOOD morrow. ’Tis I, Aelfric the Elder, with a piece of calligraphic parchment containing statements that I think — a “think piece,” let us call it — to be posted with a nail on our village’s biggest log, concerning youthful denizens born around A.D. 1000. These “millennials” are, without a doubt, the most narcissistic and hopeless cohort I have witnessed in my 35 long years on this stationary planet.
posted by shivohum at 9:42 AM PST - 47 comments

A Thing That Exists

"Neoliberal is the new hipster: everybody's it except you, and nobody can explain what it means"
I think that’s well-put, and that the similarity between the terms is no accident; hipsterism is an especially salient iteration of neoliberal subjectivity, one that gains currency by being slippery and inarticulable. These concepts become normalized by becoming boring and frustrating to talk about. The apparent vagueness in the terms seems to make them unalterable. The struggle to define them reflects the stakes of keeping them amorphous, capable of absorbing more and more behavior, making the way of thinking they describe feel inescapable, natural.
[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:24 AM PST - 74 comments

A new restaurant.

Signs (YT) is a new restaurant in Toronto. Most of the servers are Deaf. It is the first restaurant of its kind in Canada, though not the world (YT). Their Facebook page contains reviews from patrons. Here's how to order. If you're interested in ASL, the National Association of the Deaf has a great primer for you, or you can go through the glossary and lessons here at ASL University.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:16 AM PST - 31 comments

DO YOU CUT OFF YOUR ARM OR EAT A BABY?

"When I saw Snowpiercer, I thought, they’re working. I’ve never seen a movie be more like a video game and work. Everyone I knew called it "BioShock on a train", which is good shorthand, because it means you know you can expect an apocalyptic dystopia, with class struggles drawn grotesque, confined to a failing industrial space. Boom! Video games' language is useful!" [more inside]
posted by postcommunism at 8:35 AM PST - 134 comments

The million-dollar headliners, the Outkast reunions, the Ferris wheels

Why the Summer Music Festival Bubble is About to Burst.
posted by naju at 8:25 AM PST - 44 comments

Poking the Jazz Hive

On July 31st the New Yorker posted on Shouts and Murmurs: "Sonny Rollins: In His Own Words BY DJANGO GOLD". Plenty of people were not pleased. Including, yes, Sonny Rollins himself. (The editor's note on Shouts and Murmurs was added afterwards and was not part of the initial publishing of the piece)
posted by josher71 at 6:32 AM PST - 91 comments

Vulnerable to coercion or undue influence

A two-part series on problems in the clinical trials industry, from Medium.com:
The Best-Selling, Billion-Dollar Pills Tested on Homeless People
How the destitute and the mentally ill are being used as human lab rats
and
Why Are Dope-Addicted, Disgraced Doctors Running Our Drug Trials?
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:11 AM PST - 28 comments

My Life After Manson

Olivia Klaus's Op-Doc (9 minutes) on Patricia Krenwinkel, who was one of Charles Manson's Family members, convicted of seven counts of first-degree murder, and currently the longest-serving woman in California's prisons: "I would now have to be fully responsible for the damage, the wreckage and the horror."
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 3:03 AM PST - 42 comments

Poland, 2011: DVD, title: "Best of the Witcher 2"

Countries like to give President Barack Obama gifts. The Washington Post catalogued and ranked them for us:
It's really a funny collection of presents, for which, were you asked To what sort of person was this gift given?, you'd likely have a wide variety of responses. Argentina gave Obama a silver dagger in a display box in 2012, perhaps confusing the president with their 13-year-old nephew. Britain gave the family a shawl and some kids clothes in 2009, playing the role of America's eccentric aunt.
posted by quadrilaterals at 12:24 AM PST - 65 comments

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