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Arguably the single most influential public intellectual alive today
The analysis and importance of Wang Huning.
The New Yorker profiles Wang Huning (王沪宁), an influential Chinese political thinker, member of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo's Standing Committee, and author of a 1991 book about America.
Steering Committee Check-In: October 2022
The MetaFilter Steering Committee is excited to bring you the first Steering Committee Check-In! Inside we have some updates on what we’ve done in the past month, what we’re working on this month, and a request for input from the community.
Andor: Reckoning
Cassian's desperation to avoid arrest leads him to a mysterious man with unknown connections.
Movie: The Wizard of Oz
Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl (Judy Garland) kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.
Rick and Morty: Rick: A Mort Well Lived
Roy's our boy, broh.
Movie: Trollhunter
A group of students investigates a series of mysterious bear killings, but learns that there are much more dangerous things going on. They start to follow a mysterious hunter, learning that he is actually a troll hunter. A Norwegian mockumentary with an appropriate level of creeping dread, but one that also benefits from generous helpings of dry wit.
email [deprecated]
Carlos Fenollosa has given up on self hosting email after 20 years. You might recognize Fenollosa from his handy list of Unix tricks. His argues that even emails from SDF don't work, noting that he's "positive that the beards of their admins are grayer than (his) and they will have tried to tweak every nook and cranny available."
Of course the SDF (previously) is older than the actual web and so old it refers to ARPANET emails.
Give your ears a sonic vacation
The US National Park Service has a few high quality recorded soundscapes from Rocky Mountain National Park.
Put on your headphones, close your eyes, and take a little trip to the country.
This post brought to you by A-SYNC
It all started with a found footage video [9m13s] that since early January has gotten over 38 million views. Purportedly discovered in 1996, what starts out as friends goofing around with their video camera turns into an exploration of strange yellow corridors and something lurking therein. Just a few days later, a second video, this time from 1988, showed some kind of scientific test [1m48s] going on that does a something... Shortly after that, First Contact [1m57s]. What is going on?
That ‘Deaf Child in Area’ Is Now a Deaf Adult — and He’s Hot!!!
The Squeaky Wheel: your top news source for disabled people, by disabled people.
The alphabet, animated, one letter at a time
Mike Salcedo decided to try and animate one thing a day. So he chose the alphabet. It got somewhat out of hand.
"Why does that mushroom sound like Strong Bad?"
How long has it been since we had a Flash Friday?
The Mellow Mushroom is a chain of pizza restaurants based and primarily set in the U.S. state of Georgia. What else is owned and operated in Georgia? Homestar Runner! Back in 2001 these two semiagrarian planets shared an orbit for a time: the Brothers Chaps made a website for Mellow Mushroom that will look and sound very familiar to fans of Strong Bad and friends. The site changed design in 2007, but the Chaps' version is still hosted on the company's website, and although Flash is dead, if you install the Ruffle browser extension you can see the site largely as it existed back when it was active. More information is on the Homestar Runner Wiki.
The Mellow Mushroom is a chain of pizza restaurants based and primarily set in the U.S. state of Georgia. What else is owned and operated in Georgia? Homestar Runner! Back in 2001 these two semiagrarian planets shared an orbit for a time: the Brothers Chaps made a website for Mellow Mushroom that will look and sound very familiar to fans of Strong Bad and friends. The site changed design in 2007, but the Chaps' version is still hosted on the company's website, and although Flash is dead, if you install the Ruffle browser extension you can see the site largely as it existed back when it was active. More information is on the Homestar Runner Wiki.
Using song lyrics as AI image prompts
SolarProphet
is a youtube creator who's recently been on a kick of "[song] but every lyric is an AI generated image". A fun example of human creativity with AI images. ("Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny" is possibly my favourite.)
SLYTChannel.
Hidden Object Game!
Long long ago, before the search for things buried in images proliferated on mobile platforms, there was this classic early example. A true test of your observation skills, it will keep you going for some time. The editor of this image has cleverly hidden within it a can of Spam. Can you find it? It has stymied tens of thousands of searchers for over twenty years. Good luck to you, internet user, and find that spam!
Predatory Givers
RIP buys the debts just like any other collection company would — except instead of trying to profit, they send out notices to consumers saying that their debt has been cleared. To date, RIP has purchased $6.7 billion in unpaid debt and relieved 3.6 million people of debt. The group says retiring $100 in debt costs an average of $1. from This group's wiped out $6.7 billion in medical debt, and it's just getting started [NPR]
I want to go to there
Michael Heizer’s City, a 1.5 mile x 0.5 mile monumental artwork in the Nevada Desert is finally open for visitors in September. Write for an invite! Benjamin Sutton has a brief story in The Art Newspaper, and Michael Kimmelman, Todd Heisler, and Noah Throop have a deep dive at The New York Times. (No paywall)
Top of the Charts in 1400 BCE
Want to hear (a version of) the world's oldest known complete song?
Germanic-Nordic experimental folk collective Heilung have recorded a version of the Hymn to Nikkal, a paean to the Moon Goddess Nikkal which is the only complete piece among the 3,400-year-old Hurrian Songs. The songs were inscribed with both words and musical notation in cuneiform on clay tablets, and were excavated from the ancient Amorite-Canaanite city of Ugarit in northern Syria. Vocalist Maria Franz says "The rhythm in that text is just so weird; it’s so alien. I’ve never heard anything like it.”
It’s the future now, and everything cool on the internet is about God
At the heart of all this motion is a lust for crawling through someone else’s ambiguity, in staring at a post or profile for longer than the machine’s trained you to, in the toothsome frustration of trying to figure out what’s a revelation, what’s a dark joke, and what’s just the result of a chemically imbalanced brain and an eternally available keyboard. […] You can’t really make a name for yourself as an authenticity-poster and then pivot to posting unhinged textsprawls. Well, you probably can, and people probably will as this type of online life drips into the mainstream, but it will be in mimetic microdoses.— Intimacy and the Machine: Godposting – or: New Internet Esotericism, by Biz Sherbert (Sept 2021)
It's time to talk about where Cabbage Patch Dolls come from
On Twitter, Sarah Baird describes a visit to where Cabbage Patch Dolls are "born." (Wayback Machine) It’s adorable, terrifying, and bonkers!
Hank Green Explains the Climate Bill
"This is a big problem, that no one person understands all of. But in this video you're going to go from understanding more than like, 80 or 90% of people, to understanding this more than 99% of people. And it's only going to take you like 15 minutes". (SLYT 22:23)
What else are you going to do with your weekend?
There are people out there who have never watched LOST, who have LOST once, and who have LOST way too many times. YouTube's Billiam falls into the third camp, and he's bringing us recap episodes of the series. These aren't normal recaps, these get into the entire web of interconnections and intrigue and even the details of the production of the show, and give you the most complete picture of the series you might ever find. Season one is covered in LOST Was Weird: A Show No One Wanted To Make [3h], and seasons two and three in LOST: TV'S GREATEST MESS [6h20m]. I assume the remaining three seasons will be covered over the next year or two. 9 hours of YouTube recap is way shorter than three seasons!
Common Markdown, a robust and standardized subset of Markdown
An old thing, but a good thing.
CommonMark [is a] strongly defined, highly compatible specification of Markdown[, …] a plain text format for writing structured documents, based on formatting conventions from email and usenet… the following sites and projects have adopted CommonMark: Discourse, GitHub, GitLab, Reddit, Qt, Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange, Swift (Markdown for MeFi)
Reference Card and Interactive Tutorial
CommonMark [is a] strongly defined, highly compatible specification of Markdown[, …] a plain text format for writing structured documents, based on formatting conventions from email and usenet… the following sites and projects have adopted CommonMark: Discourse, GitHub, GitLab, Reddit, Qt, Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange, Swift (Markdown for MeFi)
Reference Card and Interactive Tutorial
“We need to take away their children”
A deeply reported story about the Trump Administration’s policy of separating immigrants illegally crossing the border from their children.
SL Atlantic story delving into the drivers, mistakes, intentions, and lies comprising the Trump Administration’s policy of taking children from immigrants crossing the border, regardless of whether the parent legally requested asylum or crossed outside of a port or legal crossing location.
The policy was planned and implemented by “Hawks” who needed to shut out the “squishies” and “bleeding hearts” in the bureaucracy so that the policy could be implemented without planning or concern for the impact on the victims or on other departments who would be blindsided with having to deal with the resulting separated parents and children.
It is not down in any map
Notable people shows an interactive globe of most notable person born in locations around the world (for some values of "notable").
"I hadn't given sufficient thought to the reverse operation."
Climate scientist John Kennedy explains via an anecdote involving himself, an orange, and hubris that the phrase "some scientists think" should be taken with a shaker of salt. (SLTwitter)
The Minds of Bumblebees
"...The observation that bees are most likely sentient beings has important ethical implications. It’s well known that many species of bees are threatened by pesticides and wide-scale habitat loss, and that this spells trouble because we need these insects to pollinate our crops. But is the utility of bees the only reason they should be protected? I don’t think so. The insight that bees have a rich inner world and unique perception, and, like humans, are able to think, enjoy and suffer, commands respect for the diversity of minds in nature. With this respect comes an obligation to protect the environments that shaped these minds..."
Bumblebees can create mental imagery, a 'building block of consciousness', study suggests
Bumblebees can create mental imagery, a 'building block of consciousness', study suggests
Atoms and Bits
The story so far: So until some random assortment of matter and energy somehow arranged itself into what we think of as 'life', the universe was just that: a random assortment of matter and energy. After life, life began to arrange matter and energy, according to life -- creating life (and death) at least on the third rock from some star...
Field-specific terms for "We don't know".
Diseases can be idiopathic. Archaeological artefacts can be for ritual purposes*. What are some other technical-sounding terms from other fields that means "we're really not sure"?
Energy transition's age of abundance: No one will fight wars over solar
After Going Solar, I Felt the Bliss of Sudden Abundance
[ungated] - "My rooftop panels showed me that a world powered by renewables would be an overflowing horn of plenty, with fast, sporty cars and comfy homes."
Just Astonishing
Joni Mitchell performed at the Newport Folk Festival in 1967, fifty-five years ago. This past Sunday, in a surprise appearance with Brandi Carlisle, she returned for another full set, her first in over two decades. More clips inside, have some tissues ready.
Hero cat liberates underground city of friendly robots
Stray follows a brave cat's journey through a world without humans, making robot friends along the way. Dog review. Cat reviews. More cat reviews. IGN. RPS.
Severance: The We We Are
The team discovers troubling revelations.
Looking into the universe in June 2022
Today NASA published the first image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope.
That makes this a fine day to catch up on all of the other ways people and our machines are exploring space.
On the Origins of Posthuman Speciation
Histography: Timeline of History
- "Histography is an interactive timeline that spans across 14 billion years of history, from the Big Bang to 2015. The site draws historical events from Wikipedia and self-updates daily with new recorded events. The interface allows for users to view between decades to millions of years. The viewer can choose to watch a variety of events which have happened in a particular period or to target a specific event in time. For example you can look at the past century within the categories of war and inventions."[1,2,3] (via)
Absurd Trolley Problems (aka, A Chidi-stomachache-generator)
A series of increasingly absurd philosophical quandaries. CW: a lot of cartoon death by trolley, moral philosophy. What's the trolley problem? Who's Chidi? previously previouslier still more previously
Lie to me: Mission: Impossible
Suppose your story situation is this. Character A is telling a story, but it's a lie. Character B realizes it's a lie, but doesn't signal that recognition. This is really two problems in one: How do you tell the audience A is lying? And how do you convey that B knows but doesn't reveal that knowledge?
DeathSucks.pdf (also known as SayingGoodbye.pdf)
A free "workbook on the kind of bullshit you need to do when someone you love dies", available as a "version with lots of swearing at the useless, shitty situation you're in" or a "version with a fair amount of black humor but no cursewords". Including "Prepare to spend a long and miserable time on the phone," "Depressing Mad Libs" (obituary templates), "So You Suddenly Have To Become Some Kind of Hacker," and "How to plan a non-religious death party". Published 2019.
Where are all the assheads?
Colin Morris scraped 15 years of Reddit comments to perform a detailed analysis of the frequencies of compound-word insults. The results are presented in the document
Compound pejoratives on Reddit – from buttface to wankpuffin.
Extremely optional potato whimsy
Without any particular planning, some folks (myself included) have had a good time making and commenting on front page posts about potatoes in the last few days. There's no particular reason, no official theme week or anything like that; I saw several people commenting "what's going on?" or "is this a theme week?" so this is your reassurance that you didn't miss an announcement or something. It's just snowballed organically. If you're enjoying it, have fun! If you don't love the fad, please do feel free to post other stuff as usual. Probably the potato harvest season will end in a few days or weeks.
Transition Team Post #4
Hi everyone, as promised, we’re sharing the initial survey results. Huge thank-you to iamkimiam for writing the questions, and to bleep, kimberrussell, librarylis, mochapickle, tiny frying pan, and valleys for stepping in to help us tag and summarize the data. bleep jumped in and put together some great dashboards for us to more easily count tags, do error-checking and get a handle on how to start those summaries. Again, these are the initial summaries for this MetaTalk, so necessarily a little abbreviated, but we hope it gives a broad-strokes picture of where the site is right now.
Thoughts on Imperial College London's Masters in Machine Learning...
... and Data Science? How well-regarded is this degree? How difficult?
Purge Questions
Okay, I am rewatching the Purge film/tv series with my kiddo and I have a growing list of questions. Considering that it is likely impractical to corner James DeMonaco and ask him, I present them instead to whoever might happen upon this thread.
Severance: Defiant Jazz
Mark and the team encounter new security measures from Cobel.
The Church Play Cinematic Universe
It's actually required by law that every evangelical church have at least one person who takes Irish stepdancing classes
(CW: Racism) Jenny Nicholson reviews one Canadian church's Easter plays.