Most Favorited Posts in the Past 30 Days (24 hours, 7 days, 12 months, all time)
Here's a quick guide to what the numbers mean. Subscribe
Death, Lonely Death
Billions of miles away at the edge of the Solar System Voyager 1 has gone mad and has begun to die
My hosts were nice people. They showed us extraordinary hospitality
Kate Wagner (a cycling journalist best known for her blog McMansion Hell) takes a trip to the Austin Grand Prix for Road and Track magazine as a guest of INEOS F1 team. A subeditor chose the pull quote “If you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever.”. Shortly after, an editor chose to pull the article entirely.
Colonoscopy strategies
"Before I get into the whys of it, let me say that having my first four colonoscopies all happen within one twelve-month period allowed me to rapidly refine my prep techniques. 'Prep', here, being the common nickname for the nasty stuff you must swallow to thoroughly clean out your guts for a proper examination. I learned that prep takes many forms, today." Jason McIntosh shares "How not to screw it up" and a preparatory technique that includes "Eight coins or other tiny objects you can use as tokens." He further recommends "the delightful 'Welcome to Colonoscopy Land' by Anne Helen Petersen" (previously) which aims to break taboos and discuss "pooping your guts, the best fake sleep of your life, and having no memory of getting a camera pushed up your butt."
The Getty Makes 88,000 Art Images Free to Use However You Like
The Getty museum has released a huge trove of images under a CC0 license (essentially waiving copyright). Images can be downloaded in high resolution. [more inside]
How Google is killing independent sites like ours
Private equity firms are utilizing public trust in long-standing publications to sell every product under the sun. In a bid to replace falling ad revenue, publishing houses are selling their publications for parts to media groups that are quick to establish affiliate marketing deals. They’re buying magazines we love, closing their print operations, turning them into digital-only, laying off the actual journalists who made us trust in their content in the first place, and hiring third-party companies to run the affiliate arm of their sites. While this happens, investment firms and ‘innovative digital media companies’ are selling you bad products. These Digital Goliaths shouldn’t be able to use product recommendations as their personal piggy bank, simply flying through Google updates off the back of ‘the right signals,’ an old domain, or the echo of a reputable brand that is no longer.Indie air purifier review site HouseFresh does a deep dive into the incestuous world of top-ranking Google product search results. [more inside]
Texas Red...and Other Chili Recipes
The dish known as chili, or chilli, or chile, is a land of contrasts. Let's just get that out of the way up front.
The origins of chili are not fully clear, but it seems to have come primarily from San Antonio Texas in the 1800's, where a hash or stew of beef, chili peppers, and other spices called "chili con carne" was popular. It is apparently not of Mexican origin but rather a "Tex-Mex" recipe of primarily US origin.
Anyway, on to the recipes! [more inside]
The origins of chili are not fully clear, but it seems to have come primarily from San Antonio Texas in the 1800's, where a hash or stew of beef, chili peppers, and other spices called "chili con carne" was popular. It is apparently not of Mexican origin but rather a "Tex-Mex" recipe of primarily US origin.
Anyway, on to the recipes! [more inside]
History of Lettering Comics
The Art and History of Lettering Comics is available free on letterer Todd Klein's blog. Originally planned as a print book, he's posted the whole thing online. From the early 1900s to today, Todd covers the evolution of word balloons, special effects lettering and comic book and newspaper comic letterers known and unknown and much more.
Stand In Pride
"A while ago my wife introduced me to Stand In Pride, where queer people can find stand-in family members for support and indeed often for big life events — when their biological families don’t show up. And so it came to pass that a couple of weeks ago I had the singular honour of walking Taylor down the aisle to marry Ruth. Family is what you make it. Love endures." (via @chrisphin on Mastodon, with their permission and featuring lovely pictures of the wedding.) [more inside]
The World Is Not Un Oeuf
Omelet you finish, but whipped egg dishes are popular around the world. Some that Western audiences might not be familiar with: Uganda's Rolex, Malaysia's Ramly burger, South Asia's Anda Bhurji and Akuri, Japan's chawan mushi and Turkey's Menemen, the world is ova-flowing with possibilities. [more inside]
Image generation as fast as you can type
While the generative AI scene is transfixed by trillion-scale chipmakers and bleeding-edge text-to-video models, there's plenty of work being done on simpler, more efficient open-source projects that don't require a datacenter to run. In addition to homebrew-friendly text options like Mistral, Llama, and Gemma, the makers of image generator Stable Diffusion have also experimented recently with SDXL Turbo, a lightweight, streamlined version that can generate complex images significantly faster. Previously, this required a decent graphics card and a complicated install process, or at least registration on a paid service -- but thanks to a free public demo from fal.ai, you can now generate and share constantly updating images yourself in real time, as fast as you can type. The quality may not be quite as good as the state-of-the-art stuff, but DALL-E Mini it ain't. No word on what it's costing the company to host or how long it might last, but for now the real-time responsiveness makes it easier than ever to get an intuitive feel for how modern image diffusers interpret text and what exactly they're capable of. [more inside]
A Native Solution To Vancouver's Housing Woes
Vancouver, BC has been dealing with a major housing crunch for years due to a number of factors. But the Squamish First Nation has an answer - Sen̓áḵw, a major urban mixed use development on Squamish land in the Vancouver metro area - which means that it can be developed bigger and denser than Vancouver regulations would allow...and without NIMBY interference. (SLMacLean's)
"try to analogise these great matters of state to your daily life"
Daniel Davies is a finance expert, journalist, and former investment banker whose writing I've been reading for over 20 years on Crooked Timber and on his own blog as well as elsewhere. Sometimes he writes analogies, games, or flights of fancy to help readers think about complex issues more clearly. [more inside]
Free Mixed Media Art Supplies Compatibility Chart
Free Mixed Media Art Supplies Compatibility Chart by Artist, Designer and Educator Nela Dunato:
"Behold: the most detailed free art mediums compatibility reference! The chart shows how different art mediums interact together and whether they can be safely layered on top of each other."[more inside]
That's a beautiful speech, but nobody's listening. Let's go.
"As of 2024, UbuWeb is no longer active. The archive is preserved for perpetuity, in is entirety."
Ubuweb, founded by poet Kenneth Goldsmith in 1996, was the best repository of avant-garde material in the Internet. Over the decades it accumulated an unparalleled collection of poetry, mp3's and video. [more inside]
Ubuweb, founded by poet Kenneth Goldsmith in 1996, was the best repository of avant-garde material in the Internet. Over the decades it accumulated an unparalleled collection of poetry, mp3's and video. [more inside]
Mapo Tofu Recipe: The Real Deal
I was parked in my parents’ bedroom, flipping through the channels of countless historical dramas (you can literally go through ten straight channels, and each time the screen changes, you’ll see actresses in traditional dress, fighting back tears in disturbingly clear HD), Chinese nature documentaries (run little deer, ruuuun!), and mindless extended infomercials for the best Chinese dried dates you’ll ever taste, or your money back guaranteed (…or not). Anyways, I was knocked out of my stupor when my limited Chinese vocabulary was able to detect that the latest cooking program I had settled on was featuring a professional chef explaining how to make Mapo Tofu the right way.[more inside]
Is Super Mario Maker Beaten Yet?
Is Super Mario Marker beaten yet? Back in 2015, Nintendo released Super Mario Maker for the Wii U, which allowed users to create their own Mario levels and upload them for others to play. Over 8 million levels were created for the game. On March 31, 2021 Nintendo "discontinued" the game, which meant no new levels could be uploaded. Then the second shoe dropped: Nintendo announced the Wii U servers would be turned off forever on April 8, 2024, effectively removing all of these user levels from existence. Upon hearing this news, the Super Mario Maker community began to rally around a single goal: clear every single level uploaded to the servers before the shutdown date. [more inside]
The Fundie Baby Voice
"As soon as Senator Katie Britt started speaking, I knew exactly who she is. She is so many of the pastor's wives and Sunday School teachers I knew growing up in an Evangelical church. Be sweet. Obey."
PFLAG sues Texas to protect transgender members
From Erin Reed's newsletter: In a legal filing Thursday, PFLAG National sought to block a new demand from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that would require the organization to identify its Texas transgender members, doctors who work with them, and contingency plans for anti-transgender legislation in the state. The civil investigative demand, issued on Feb. 5, calls for extensive identifying information and records from the LGBTQ+ rights organization. PFLAG, in its filing to block the demands, describes them as "retaliation" for its opposition to anti-transgender laws in the state and alleges that they violate the freedom of speech and association protections afforded by the United States and Texas constitutions. [more inside]
They don't make them like they used to
I was on the phone, asking for a theoretical quote to reupholster a five-year-old or so midrange sofa, which cost more than $1,000 when new. That task, the upholsterer told me, would run me several times more than the couch was originally worth, and, owing to its construction, it was now worth nowhere near its sale price. The upholsterer proceeded to lecture me, in a helpful, passionate, and sometimes kindly manner, about how sofas made in the past 15 years or so are absolute garbage, constructed of sawdust compressed and bonded with cheap glue, simple brackets in place of proper joinery, substandard spring design, flimsy foam, and a lot of staples. Until recently, people had no reason to suspect that a $1,200 sofa would be anything less than high quality; the vast majority of the stuff in stores was fairly well made, and you could sit on it to test it. Today, not so much. [...] A combination of factors, including world-altering shifts in labor, manufacturing, transportation logistics, and middle-class American aesthetics, has created a grim scene: a two-year-old, $1,200 Instagram sofa—busted, on the curb, waiting for the large-item trash pickup or an enterprising scavenger who doesn’t realize just how shitty this thing is.Dwell.com asks: Why Are (Most) Sofas So Bad?
Karen Carpenter, the Drummer Who Sang
An eighteen-year-old Karen Carpenter going wild on the drums on Dancing in the Street (and the same song again). This is from back when the Carpenter siblings were two-thirds of the Dick Carpenter Trio. At fifteen she was already a fantastic drummer, as can be heard on their cover of Caravan. Here she is in 1976 on stage doing a drum solo on multiple sets that turns into a drum duet and here's a similar routine from the 1976 Carpenters TV special except she's duetting with herself. By then she rarely drummed on their songs, though here she's drumming on Help in 1974. But in 1971 she still drummed on most tracks and that version of the band was recorded for the BBC in a 40 minute concert. Finally, here's a discussion thread by fans about her as a drummer.