Marie Duval was one of the most unusual, pioneering and boisterous cartoonists of the nineteenth century. As a groundbreaking female cartoonist depicting a long-overlooked urban, often working-class milieu, the wide range and quantity of her work has been forgotten. A new website showcases her work for the comic magazine Judy, including her most famous creation, the working-class anti-hero Ally Sloper, 'the first comics superstar'.
posted to MetaFilter by verstegan at 6:16 AM on April 9, 2016 (4 comments)

Patricia Moodian: Really it was easy to find the women to participate. There were talented and able women everywhere, chafing at the bit to get a chance to show they could do such amazing work. I did make the calls, have the meetings at my humble abode, and dealt with Turner. The brilliant and legendary Trina Robbins had already published the first all-women comic, and I was very motivated by all that she taught me.

An oral history of Wimmen's Comix. Part Two.
posted to MetaFilter by MartinWisse at 11:43 AM on April 7, 2016 (6 comments)

Heavy metal definitely rules! Twisted Sister, Judas Priest, Dokken, Ozzy, Scorpions. They all rule! Heavy Metal Parking Lot was one of the earliest, pre-Internet viral films, a slice of a simpler time in mid-80s America. Deadspin asks: what actually was it all about, and where did those teenage metalheads end up?
posted to MetaFilter by Mezentian at 1:33 AM on March 30, 2016 (66 comments)

"Growing up in this home, I was ensconced in blackness — and as an adult, I now see and appreciate the ways that affirmed my identity. I finally saw Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when I was 24, and I was shocked that it was lauded as a 'staple of teen comedy.' I had always thought that the classic tale of Chicago youth skipping class was Cooley High. I didn’t learn whiteness as a default, or the limitations placed on those who exist outside of it, until I was much, much older." Jasmine Sanders (@ToniAliceZora) writes for Buzzfeed on growing up in one of Chicago's poorest black neighborhoods.
posted to MetaFilter by capricorn at 11:39 AM on March 20, 2016 (18 comments)

Cristian Ispir explores 14th-century bibliophile Richard de Bury's advice on how to take care of books — or rather, how not to.
posted to MetaFilter by metaquarry at 4:30 AM on March 4, 2016 (9 comments)

A complete alphabetical list of all of cartoonist Don Martin's soundwords in Mad Magazine. (from Doug Gilford's Mad Cover Site)
posted to MetaFilter by MCMikeNamara at 6:46 PM on January 21, 2016 (24 comments)

The Mad Painter was a sketch that first aired on Sesame Street in 1972. In the series, Our Protagonist (Paul Benedict, looking suspiciously like Greg Nog) decides he's going to paint a certain number, finds a surface on which to paint the numeral, paints said number, and then something funny happens. The Painter's co-stars included a young Stockard Channing, a bald mustachioed guy (Jerome Raphael), and a gorilla. Robert Dennis scores the pieces jauntily. Here they are, in numerical order: [ 2 — 3 — 4 — 5 — 6 — 7 — 8 — 9 — 10* — 11 ]
posted to MetaFilter by not_on_display at 10:39 PM on January 13, 2016 (45 comments)

Of Oz the Wizard. Finally someone put it in alphabetical order! SLVimeo.
posted to MetaFilter by Obscure Reference at 1:21 PM on January 2, 2016 (58 comments)

Sometimes I see things that make me want to keep on living. As an end of the year thank you to the Metafilter community, I offer these obscure gems. The best of the web indeed.
posted to MetaFilter by crazylegs at 4:14 PM on December 30, 2015 (9 comments)

"A professor at Texas A&M University posted these photos to Facebook. 'There has been a dead cockroach in the Anthropology building's stairwell for at least two weeks. Some enterprising person has now made her a little shrine.'" Things escalated from there.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 5:25 PM on December 20, 2015 (75 comments)

If Christmas creep has got you down, try keeping it weird with holiday music posts from WFMU's Beware of the Blog:
posted to MetaFilter by mandolin conspiracy at 1:40 PM on December 6, 2015 (13 comments)

The Casiotone MT-40, an electronic musical keyboard, was launched on the consumer market in 1981 and discontinued roughly a year later. It was not a particularly powerful piece of gear; it came with 23 fixed timbres and six drum patterns, played on tinny electronic sounds. However, in 1985, one MT-40 ended up in Jamaica, in the hands of a young musician named Noel Davy, where its bass pads and one of its drum patterns ended up instrumental in spawning the new electronic style of reggae and dancehall.
posted to MetaFilter by acb at 6:34 PM on December 4, 2015 (23 comments)

Nigerian AfroSFF writer Wole Talabi shares links to his favourite 10 short stories of 2015 with a short intro.
posted to MetaFilter by infini at 6:02 AM on November 29, 2015 (11 comments)

Heather Lindsley's "Werewolf Loves Mermaid," Sunil Patel's "The Merger," and Emil Ostrovski's "Tragic Business" develop humorous situations from SF/F motifs: cryptid romance, intergalactic business negotiations, and the cycle of death and rebirth, respectively. Lincoln Michel's "Dark Air" combines common weird fiction / horror situations with a very dry, very dark sense of humor. Naomi Kritzer's "So Much Cooking" is a serious SF story about a grave possibility, but it brings the matter home via a witty parody of a cooking blog.
posted to MetaFilter by Monsieur Caution at 11:44 AM on November 29, 2015 (9 comments)

The 10 Best Genre-Bending Books - PublishersWeekly
20 Strange and Wonderful Books - cartania.com
10 Ultra-Weird Science Fiction Novels that Became Required Reading - io9
10 Weirdest Science Fiction Novels That You've Never Read - also io9
China Miéville's top 10 weird fiction books - The Guardian
The Weird: An Introduction - Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, Weird Fiction Review
posted to MetaFilter by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 6:02 PM on November 14, 2015 (53 comments)

How Capicola Became Gabagool: The Italian New Jersey Accent, Explained.
posted to MetaFilter by bondcliff at 6:40 AM on November 6, 2015 (105 comments)

I Thought I Told You To Shut Up. In 1977 David Boswell created comic book anti-hero Reid Fleming, the World’s Toughest Milkman. 30 years later, the big screen Hollywood adaptation remains in contractual limbo. Narrated by Academy Award-Winner Jonathan Demme. Previously on M-F, with that comment .
posted to MetaFilter by growabrain at 1:21 PM on October 19, 2015 (30 comments)

*Norse God Family Tree* *The Emu War* (previously) *Headless Folk of the French Revolution* *How Voltaire broke the lottery* *Mummy Brown and other Historical Colors* *Management Secrets of Genghis Khan* -- just some of the Veritable Hokum dredged from history and served up in comics form by Korwin Briggs.
posted to MetaFilter by MartinWisse at 1:07 AM on October 19, 2015 (28 comments)

History v Historical Fiction by Jane Smiley [The Guardian] Historical fiction is not a secondary form – I was condescended to by a conservative historian who cannot see that he too constructs stories.

“The condescender was Niall Ferguson, a conservative historian about 15 years younger than me, who wanted to be sure that I understood that the historical novel is all made up, but that historical non-fiction, written by historians is truth. He referred to his research. I referred to my research. He wasn’t convinced. I suggested that the demands of history and fiction are slightly different – that since a novel is a story, it must be complete, and since a history must be accepted by the reader as accurate, it must be incomplete.”

posted to MetaFilter by Fizz at 1:30 PM on October 15, 2015 (40 comments)

Pardon My French: 561 covers of English-language hit songs, sung in French (by native French speakers of varying musical abilities) in the most literal word-for-word translations over chiptune instrumentals. Includes classics such as L'éclair de Jacques Qui Saute (Les Pierres qui roulent), Sexuelle Guérison (Marvain La-Joie) or Le Paradis des Bandits (Yo Sympa). Includes MP3s, lyrics and links to the original songs for earbleach. BAISE OUAIS !
posted to MetaFilter by elgilito at 1:47 AM on October 13, 2015 (11 comments)

Vanishing Canada: Why we’re all losers in Ottawa’s war on data. [Maclean's Magazine]

Stories about government data and historical records being deleted, burned—even tossed into Dumpsters—have become so common in recent years that many Canadians may feel inured to them. But such accounts are only the tip of a rapidly melting iceberg. A months-long Maclean’s investigation, which includes interviews with dozens of academics, scientists, statisticians, economists and librarians, has found that the federal government’s “austerity” program, which resulted in staff cuts and library closures (16 libraries since 2012)—as well as arbitrary changes to policy, when it comes to data—has led to a systematic erosion of government records far deeper than most realize, with the data and data-gathering capability we do have severely compromised as a result.

posted to MetaFilter by Fizz at 9:19 AM on September 19, 2015 (85 comments)

"I’ve been doing a series of comics about men being deceived by makeup."
posted to MetaFilter by griphus at 4:02 PM on September 15, 2015 (80 comments)

In its all-too-brief 3½ year run, Comedy Central's sketch comedy powerhouse Key & Peele burned brightly, leavening Peabody-award-winning social commentary with sublime silliness and Hollywood-quality production values, all centered on the impeccable character acting of co-stars Jordan (Peele) and Keegan-Michael (Key). By the time its end was announced, characters like the Substitute Teacher, the East/West College Bowl players, and Obama's Anger Translator had captured the popular consciousness, while skits like TeachingCenter and Negrotown deftly spotlighted our most pressing problems. With the finale airing tonight, and the dynamic duo free to tackle other projects, why not revisit the program's concentrated brilliance in the form of ~100 of their very best short bits available on the web, sorted loosely by topic.
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 10:27 AM on September 9, 2015 (76 comments)

Previously, we were left with unanswered questions like: Why did Whoopi agree to make this movie? Why did she want out? Why wouldn't she want out? Who would think to make a buddy cop sci-fi comedy starring a dinosaur? And for the love of God, why? Finally, we get (some of) the answers.
posted to MetaFilter by meese at 1:25 PM on August 26, 2015 (24 comments)

John Scioli, Brooklyn's Most Eccentric Book Seller, Explains Why He's Cashing Out
posted to MetaFilter by Gin and Comics at 7:36 AM on August 17, 2015 (61 comments)

Why I Deleted Your Band's Promo Email (SLTumblr)
posted to MetaFilter by Faint of Butt at 10:12 AM on July 23, 2015 (50 comments)

Joe Gould died well over half a century ago after having been gone from his haunts in Greenwich for half a decade. He had been a fixture in the Village for decades, friend to famous writers and artists, living in penury while saying he was working on a massively long work called Oral History of Our Time (coining the term [pdf] "oral history" in the process) from which only a few short pieces were ever published. In the 40s he became famous thanks to a profile called "Professor Sea Gull" written by star New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell. After Gould's death, Mitchell wrote another profile in 1964, "Joe Gould's Secret", where Mitchell said that the Oral History only existed in Gould's mind. After that article, Mitchell never published again in his lifetime despite being on The New Yorker's staff until his death in 1996. Since then, various further secrets have been unearthed about Gould, diaries from the 40s, the identity of Gould's mysterious patron, and now New Yorker writer Jill Lepore has written about Gould's whereabouts in the last years in his life, and much else, in a sad profile called Joe Gould's Teeth. [Joe Gould previously]
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 11:56 AM on July 21, 2015 (10 comments)

Housework is not work. Sex work is not work. Emotional work is not work. Why? Because they don’t take effort? No, because women are supposed to provide them uncompensated, out of the goodness of our hearts.
posted to MetaFilter by sciatrix at 2:38 PM on July 15, 2015 (2054 comments)

"The Confederate flag didn't get hijacked. It took off from Defending Slavery Airport and landed, right on time, at Defending Segregation Terminal." Jay Smooth: 12 symbols of Southern pride actually worth celebrating.
posted to MetaFilter by NoraReed at 12:28 PM on July 17, 2015 (126 comments)

"The thing I find very exciting is waiting for the subway train and sometimes you'll get a glorious one that arrives decorated like a birthday cake!" Watching My Name Go By is a short 1976 BBC documentary about graffiti, artists, and graffiti artists in New York City. The film is based on Norman Mailer's 1974 essay for Esquire magazine, "The Faith of Grafitti." [via]
posted to MetaFilter by Room 641-A at 6:14 PM on July 16, 2015 (5 comments)

“A semicolon is used when an author could’ve chosen to end their sentence, but chose not to. The author is you and the sentence is your life."
posted to MetaFilter by flex at 9:30 PM on July 14, 2015 (47 comments)

African sci-fi features all manner of weird and outlandish things, from crime-fighting robots to technological dystopias. But could they be closer to predicting the future than they realise?

posted to MetaFilter by infini at 1:04 PM on July 10, 2015 (24 comments)

From Archive.org: "The A/V Geeks Film Archive is an ephemeral film collection curated by Skip Elsheimer. What started as a hobby more than ten years is now a lifetime commitment. His collection has grown to over 24,000 films gathered from school auctions, thrift stores, closets and dumpsters." Includes such hits as "Wink Martindale Talks about "Year 1999 AD"! Disney's "VD--Attack Plan"! DoD's "Red Nightmare"!
posted to MetaFilter by MonkeyToes at 5:27 PM on June 24, 2015 (9 comments)

As with anything in this world, excess is excess, but inadequate is inadequate. A writer must know when the weight of the words used to describe a scene is bearing down on the scene itself. A writer should develop the measuring tape to know when to describe characters' thoughts in long sentences and when not to. But a writer, above all, should aim to achieve artistry with language which, like the painter, is the only canvas we have. Writers should realize that the novels that are remembered, that become monuments, would in fact be those which err on the side of audacious prose, that occasionally allow excess rather than those which package a story — no matter how affecting — in inadequate prose.

Chigozie Obioma for The Millions: The Audacity of Prose.
posted to MetaFilter by divined by radio at 2:22 PM on June 23, 2015 (9 comments)

Still mourning the loss of walmart.horse? Well, the hot new whimsical mix of corporate identity and new TLDs is mcdonalds.hiphop, which serves up a YouTube playlist of hiphop/rap-themed McDonalds commercials going back 30 years and including non-U.S. content from the UK, Israel, France, Czech Republic, India, Russia and South Africa. From the same merry prankster who brought us nytimes.cat, which got C&D'd in record time, this one has survived a whole week so far (and with some publicity; thanks Mental Floss). But then, Mickey D's has a hiphop history that goes beyond commercials.
posted to MetaFilter by oneswellfoop at 3:44 PM on June 21, 2015 (11 comments)

Back in February, I asked the hive mind for their ideas for 40 things to do before you're 40 for a friend of mine. I wanted to say thanks...
posted to MetaTalk by girlgenius at 9:01 PM on June 19, 2015 (17 comments)

Google Photos recognizes the content of images by training neural networks. Google Research is conducting experiments on these simulated visual brains by evolving images to hyperstimulate them, creating machine hallucinations - like that image of melting squirrels that's been going around lately.
posted to MetaFilter by moonmilk at 10:55 PM on June 17, 2015 (106 comments)

Do Androids Dream Of Cooking? The following recipes are sampled from a trained neural net. Happy cooking!
posted to MetaFilter by The Card Cheat at 3:59 PM on June 12, 2015 (62 comments)

Two guys show us how to write an Alt-J song while eating rice crackers.
posted to MetaFilter by btfreek at 11:24 AM on June 12, 2015 (14 comments)

Green Leader, a comic by Daniel Warren Johnson (Single Link Star Wars)
posted to MetaFilter by EatTheWeek at 11:29 PM on June 10, 2015 (27 comments)

In 2011 they made Patti Smith cry with their rendition of “Dancing Barefoot”, in 2012 they got a standing ovation from Paul Simon for their version of “America”. Yesterday sisters Klara and Johanna Söderberg, aka First Aid Kit (previously), was back at the Polar Music Prize ceremony, performing "Red Dirt Girl" by this year’s laureate Emmylou Harris.
posted to MetaFilter by Petersondub at 2:57 AM on June 10, 2015 (18 comments)

End of life planning is hard. There are checklists, like this set from Get Your Shit Together. There are practical tips for making things easier for whoever's dealing with your estate after you're gone, like the tech tips in this previously from MeFi's own Jessamyn. But in the murky middle between living completely independently and being incapable of managing everyday tasks lies a subtler and more difficult question: how to organize and manage your money when financial competence is one of the first areas to decline on the slide from mild cognitive impairment to dementia. SeekingAlpha contributor PsychoAnalyst has a surprisingly nuanced analysis of the steps self-directed investors can take to protect their finances from the underestimated risk of their own declining ability to make good financial decisions, and raises some points worth thinking about for folks beyond the site's investor wonk audience.
posted to MetaFilter by deludingmyself at 10:03 AM on June 6, 2015 (26 comments)

"If you were to compile a list of the greatest sketch comedy shows of all time, there are a few obvious choices that you'd want to include. Naturally, Britain's influential Monty Python's Flying Circus would probably top the list, followed closely by the equally iconic Saturday Night Live and SCTV, with Mr. Show, In Living Color, A Bit of Fry & Laurie, Chapelle's Show, and even modern-day favorites like Key & Peele somewhere in the mix.

"One entry you should definitely include, and probably would want to rank fairly high on said list, would be the Canadian-born sketch show The Kids in the Hall, which ran on television both in the Great White North and here in the states for six or seven seasons and had a definite influence on comedy in the late '80s and early '90s."
posted to MetaFilter by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 2:55 PM on June 5, 2015 (150 comments)

It instantly hits your eyes haloed in a corona of potency—structured so soundly as to seem staged, this forceful frieze of physical dominance. The Victor yells, the Loser displays himself vanquished, and the Watchers are all caught in that moment. The kinetic poetry of moving bodies, momentarily frozen, such is the stuff of the best sports photos—this has that.

It's widely recognized today as one of the greatest photographs in sports history, but Neil Leifer's masterpiece, capturing the climax of the fight 50 years ago today between Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay) and Sony Liston hardly made a stir at the time it was snapped.
posted to MetaFilter by Horace Rumpole at 6:54 AM on May 25, 2015 (34 comments)

This past year, artist Lucy Gafford developed an intriguing new medium. It's well suited to evocative sketches of simple subjects -- a portrait of Mom, a still life of avocados, a cat, a feeding pig. Please enjoy her hashtag exhibition, #ShowerHairMasterpiece.
posted to MetaFilter by Countess Elena at 9:04 PM on May 15, 2015 (11 comments)

Just sixteen years years after the Trail of Tears, the Choctaw Nation collected $710* and sent it to Ireland to help during the potato famine. In 1992, a group of Irish people retraced the Trail of Tears to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the gift.
posted to MetaFilter by Blue Jello Elf at 5:13 PM on March 30, 2015 (12 comments)

As the term borscht implies, the people who worked and stayed in the hotels and bungalow colonies were almost all Jews. The “fall” in the title of Davis’s film refers to the tourist industry collapsing after Jews became wealthier and more assimilated. After moving from the garment industry cutting rooms to accounting firms, they could now afford vacations in Puerto Rico and no longer felt the need to be in a hotel that served kosher food.

The Rise and Fall of the Borscht Belt, a 1986 documentary by Peter Davis on the famous Jewish-American holiday resorts of the Catskills, has been put online by Louis Proyect.
posted to MetaFilter by MartinWisse at 9:47 AM on March 26, 2015 (13 comments)

Rainworks are positive messages and art that only appear when it rains. Peregrine Church watched a video showing off the properties of superhydrophobic coatings and got an idea uniquely suited to his environment: famously rainy Seattle.* Using a spray-on coating, he did a stencil at a bus stop. It's invisible in dry weather, but as rain hits it and the wet concrete darkens, the writing and art becomes clear. Since then, more have been added: tentacles, hopscotch grids, environmental messages, lily pads, and more.
posted to MetaFilter by wintersweet at 5:10 PM on March 21, 2015 (34 comments)

If we're all quite aware of what it has become, then where did it come from? From Jack White’s guitar of course, and from his fingers and his brain. But what about the sequence of notes? Could they have been hanging around in the universe since the cosmic microwave background splurged into existence, just waiting to be aligned by a malleable composer? Speaking to the BBC last year, Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine said: "It's less a riff that feels like someone wrote it than it was unearthed. It's something that's always been there, and it's something that speaks to the reptilian brain of rock listeners." – Stupid & Sophisticated: The Rise & Rise Of The Seven Nation Army Riff
posted to MetaFilter by timshel at 3:12 PM on March 20, 2015 (62 comments)

An in-browser 303-like synth, plus drum machine, with 8 16-step sequences...What deadlines?
posted to MetaFilter by Zerowensboring at 6:29 PM on March 11, 2015 (22 comments)