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A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men The troubling interactions on Instagram come as social media companies increasingly dominate the cultural landscape and the internet is seen as a career path of its own. Nearly one in three preteens list influencing as a career goal, and 11 percent of those born in Generation Z, between 1997 and 2012, describe themselves as influencers. Content warning: Instagram Child Pornography
comment posted at 10:43 PM on Feb-22-24

Stylish woman walks down neon Tokyo street / Space man in a red knit helmet movie trailer / Drone view of waves crashing at Big Sur / Papercraft coral reef / Victoria crowned pigeon with striking plumage / Pirate ships battling in a cup of coffee / Historical footage of California during the gold rush / Cartoon kangaroo disco dances / Lagos in the year 2056 / Stack of TVs all showing different programs inside a gallery / White SUV speeds up a steep dirt road / Reflections in the window of a train in the Tokyo suburbs / Octopus fighting with a king crab / Flock of paper airplanes flutters through a dense jungle / Cat waking up its sleeping owner demanding breakfast / Chinese Lunar New Year celebration / Art gallery with many beautiful works of art in different styles / People enjoying the snowy weather and shopping / Gray-haired man with a beard in his 60s deep in thought / Colorful buildings in Burano Italy. An adorable dalmation looks through a window / 3D render of a happy otter standing on a surfboard / Corgi vlogging itself in tropical Maui / Aerial view of Santorini / OpenAI unveils Sora, a near-photorealistic text-to-video model with unprecedented coherency.
comment posted at 7:07 PM on Feb-15-24
comment posted at 7:14 PM on Feb-15-24
comment posted at 10:06 PM on Feb-15-24

The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion by Jason Sanford and Chris M. Barkley. The latter received from Diane Lacey copies of e-mails that were exchanged between her and Kat Jones and Dave McCarty, fellow volunteer administrators of the 2023 Hugo Awards at the Chengdu Worldcon, showing that the three of them made dossiers of Hugo Award nominees deemed to be potentially troubling to local business interests and authorities. Jones, the 2024 Hugo Administrator, has resigned from her position, after releasing a statement. Diane Lacey has apologized for her part. There have been many responses to these revelations, including by Cora Buhlert, Camestros Felapton and MeFi's Own John Scalzi.
comment posted at 12:21 PM on Feb-15-24

A video about adorable LA hipsters building a teardrop trailer
comment posted at 3:33 PM on Feb-9-24

2023 Will Go Down as the Year Twitter Died. A multipart package from The Verge looking at Twitter, for better and for worse.
comment posted at 11:02 PM on Dec-12-23
comment posted at 9:58 AM on Dec-13-23

In his ongoing attempt to to destroy Xitter, Mr Musk suggests former advertisers indulge in auto-copulation. (slyt)
comment posted at 9:15 PM on Nov-29-23

Be free from annoying your friends with eating noises while gaming! The future is now.
comment posted at 9:21 PM on Nov-29-23

As rewilding and the prospect of nature restoring itself has caught the public imagination in recent years, projects have sprung up all over Europe, often led by philanthropists and enthusiastically backed by politicians. But many of these projects have also become entangled in bureaucracy and an intense debate over the scientific practicality of rewilding. Many in the rewilding movement say that political leaders are not doing enough to restore biodiversity — leaving the mavericks with little choice but to act unilaterally and reintroduce species themselves. from The secret movement bringing Europe’s wildlife back from the brink [Coda]
comment posted at 12:40 PM on Jul-23-23
comment posted at 12:57 PM on Jul-23-23

According to his 2002 obituary, Craig Kingsbury was "...a farmer, fisherman, aquatic biologist, ox cart man, butcher, farrier, woodcarver, builder, breeder of exotic poultry, landscaper, longshoreman, able-bodied seaman, teamster, logger, stonemason, husband, father, storyteller and naturalist." He was also hired as an advisor to actor Robert Shaw - who played Quint - during the filming of Jaws, and ended up contributing to one of that film's most notorious moments (SLYT) in his cameo as fisherman Ben Gardner.
comment posted at 11:00 PM on Jul-20-23

It was in that optimistic spirit, 28 days ago, that the former president, impeached and voted out of office and impeached again, amid multiple state and federal investigations, under threat of indictment and arrest, on the verge of a congressional-committee verdict that would recommend four criminal charges to the Feds over his incitement of a mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol and threatened to hang his vice-president in a failed attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 election results, announced his third presidential campaign. Since then, he has barely set foot outside the perimeter of Mar-a-Lago. For 28 days, in fact, he has not left the state of Florida at all.
comment posted at 9:27 AM on Jan-10-23

As winter is approaching in Ukraine, the Kerch bridge has been heavily damaged, the day after Putin's 70th birthday. The very next day daily bombardments of Kyiv and other population centers had a massive increase in intensity, but this had probably been planned for a week already and mostly intended for the domestic audience. In a public debate where Western concerns dominate, the Ukrainian minister of defence Andriy P. Zagorodnyuk lays out the Ukrainian perspective on their path to victory.
comment posted at 3:29 PM on Oct-12-22

L.A. City Council's true colors were put on blast this weekend. This weekend, audio of a year-old conversation between three City Council members and the (now former) President of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor leaked, leading to a major shakeup in the City due to the conversation's overt racism and cynical political horse-trading.
comment posted at 6:46 PM on Oct-11-22

The dramatic epic emotional rollercoaster of Key & Peele's "Nooice" (SLYT).
comment posted at 11:06 PM on Aug-23-22

My daughter went for a routine chiropractor appointment. Now she’s paralysed. “Our main form of communication right now is, we’ll go through the alphabet, and she’ll let me know when I’ve gotten to the right letter, and I just spell everything out. She can also nod and thumbs up, and she can mouth things; sometimes I can get it, sometimes not. Really, right now, [we are] spelling everything out. Thankfully, she’s a very good speller. But, yeah, we just spell everything out painstakingly.”
comment posted at 8:07 AM on Aug-18-22

The unexpected TV spin-off of a box office sleeper hit helped to create a new renaissance in science fiction on cable television. The future of Stargate could be looking brighter as word of a pilot script from one of the original SG-1 producers is being pitched to the franchise's new owner, Amazon. Also, look back at the third SG-1 film that was never made and check out members of the cast performing a script written by an AI.
comment posted at 8:55 AM on Jul-29-22

Freedomland, USA. The defunct theme park has an interesting history. 'The Rise and Suspiciously Rapid Fall of Freedomland U.S.A.' (previously)
comment posted at 8:56 PM on Jun-3-22

The Future of E-Bikes "The best feeling on a bike is cruising down a hill, barely pedaling, and taking in the surroundings. E-bikes are like that all the time. "How do you know if someone has an e-bike? They'll tell you!" goes the joke."
comment posted at 4:04 PM on Jan-22-22

Build up or pay up. That is the message Massachusetts is sending to 175 cities and suburbs in the Boston area, as a bill to boost housing production begins to take effect. Almost every jurisdiction in eastern Massachusetts will have to do its part zoning for 344,000 new units of as-of-right multifamily housing—or lose access to some state grant programs. That means allowing apartments in many tony subdivisions currently reserved for single-family homes. (SLSlate)
comment posted at 7:27 PM on Jan-21-22

Caroline Wazer (Lapham's, 11/08/2021), "It's Time for Some Game Theory: Experiencing history in Assassin's Creed": "The most tantalizing loose end for me, a casual player of the games and a holder of a PhD in history, is the brief editorial note that introduces the section, which justifies the AHR's decision to branch into video-game reviewing as coming out of concern for what nonhistorians derive from playing historically themed video games ... What the boys did nearly unanimously report to Gilbert is that Assassin's Creed had made them feel more emotionally connected to the past." The paywalled AHR issue lists DOI info. More about painters John Martin and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Ruskin, The Art of England. Barthes, "The Discourse of History" / "The Reality Effect" [PDFs]. More by Wazer, who "couldn't figure out a way to work the cats into this essay, but this thread lives on."
comment posted at 1:33 PM on Nov-9-21

For Gawker, Bennett Madison writes about being a fabulist: “Help! I Couldn’t Stop Writing Fake Dear Prudence Letters That Got Published”

Writing fake letters to advice columns could not be considered a good career move; after all, it was unpaid and I wouldn’t even get a byline out of it. On the other hand, it was easy and creatively fulfilling.

comment posted at 12:28 AM on Sep-15-21

Stars and Stripes takes an unusual look at the withdrawl from Bagram Airfield. As America pulls out of Afghanistan, their influence is visible not only in the war-torn country and a complicated legacy from nearly two decades of occupation, but also in a number of low-level Pokemon guarding gyms at on-base locations.
comment posted at 11:04 AM on Jul-5-21

Untitled Theater Company #61 released a 3-part, roughly 2.5 hour adaption of Jack London's The Iron Heel. The production is enlived by songs from the IWW's Little Red Songbook.
comment posted at 8:38 AM on Jun-14-21

The first western documented¹ Japanese to visit Washington State, in 1834, were three ship wrecked sailors.
comment posted at 9:02 PM on Jun-8-21

The time for Hollywood’s "White Male Genius" is over. "Well, ma’am, I wanted to say, he’s a grown-ass man in his 40s who puts more salad on the floor than in his mouth. And me, a woman half his age, getting paid less hourly than what she made as an intern out of college, shouldn’t have to be living proof of how society silently bends around white men with no protest."
comment posted at 9:21 AM on Apr-21-21

Timber Wars is an eight-part podcast about the history of logging and environmentalism in the Pacific Northwest. It includes some great episodes on the spotted owl and the ecology of old growth forests. The series wrapped up in November, but just a few days ago, in the closing days of a failed administration, a new change to the federal rules placed 3 million acres of Northwest forests on the chopping block, removing protections for the spotted owl.
comment posted at 5:24 PM on Jan-16-21

Marbled crayfish can reproduce asexually and all their children are genetically identical females. "It's impossible to round up all of them. It's like trying to empty the ocean with a thimble," said Kevin Scheers, of the Flemish Institute for Nature and Woodland Research.
comment posted at 4:15 PM on Oct-24-20

Price gouging, while illegal, is common. There is no shortage of stories going around about people buying up mass quantities of items to resell at high prices. Including one about someone trying to buy up the potential vaccine wholesale, with the intent to provide it "for profit" only. In a country where people born with diabetes can die from lack of affordable medication, are we really so shocked that so much of the general populace sees this behavior as normal? Moreso, what does it say about us when we continue to only punish the poor for price gouging? Those "enterprising entrepreneurs" were making strikingly similar arguments for their price gouging as pharmaceutical companies do, namely, that they needed to recoup their investment.
comment posted at 12:09 AM on Mar-17-20

Greta Thunberg derangement syndrome is all too familiar. It's so common it's even a source of humour. Last week, Greta Thunberg addressed a large crowd in Bristol, UK. And for some people this was all too much, and prompted some hateful, violence-inciting comments on social media. So far, so depressingly normal.
comment posted at 9:52 AM on Mar-3-20

There was a time when new mothers were allowed to bring their newborns home from the hospital without a car seat. Then there were other dangers common to the era when Boomers were babies...like the use of dry cleaning bags as a waterproof crib liner. Not to mention those moth balls Mom stashed in the closets that looked temptingly like candy. If Mom only knew then what we know now...
comment posted at 1:43 PM on Nov-22-19

An Appalachain Trail: A Project In Regional Planning - But the original concept for tracing out a hiking path along the spine of the Appalachian Mountains, dreamed up almost a century ago by the planner, forester, and idiosyncratic social reformer Benton MacKaye, was so radical that MacKaye himself feared it would be dismissed as “bolshevistic.” What MacKaye envisioned when he first proposed the trail in a 1921 article for the Journal of the American Institute of Architects was something far beyond a woodsy recreational amenity. This “project in regional planning,” as MacKaye called it, was meant to be a thoroughgoing cultural critique of industrial modernity
comment posted at 10:59 PM on Apr-7-19

A Couple That Got Married After 2 Weeks On How It Went Down: "This is about to be a buncha laughs. Just so you know, we’re a very unique couple."
comment posted at 12:00 AM on Mar-24-19

She arrived in Iowa in 1917, aged 47, newly married, and pregnant. For the next 51 years, Emma Big Bear, lived a traditional indigenous lifestyle on the banks of the Mississippi.
comment posted at 12:58 AM on Aug-22-18

The Pacific Northwest is blanketed in smoke. Again. Topping even 2017's historically bad fire season, the past week has seen air quality at the worst levels ever recorded in the Puget Sound region. Conditions are currently unhealthy to very unhealthy in much of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon, and will likely remain poor at least until Wednesday.
comment posted at 9:30 PM on Aug-20-18

Everything is Alive is an unscripted interview show / podcast in which all the subjects are inanimate objects. In each episode, a different thing tells us its life story--and everything it says is true." There have been three episodes so far: 1. Louis, can of soda; 2. Maeve, lamppost; 3. Dennis, pillow. They're not "sequential," but I do suggest listening to them in order.
comment posted at 11:08 AM on Aug-15-18

Reddit, I know, right? But wait! The most upvoted story--and my favorite--so far: "My cat, Tuffy stole a piece of bread off of the stove and put it in the floor next to the cabinet. She then stared at it intensely, and motionlessly for an hour. We thought that was creepy. Then a mouse came out from behind the cabinet to get the bread and she pounced it! She was using the bread as motherfucking bait! This is the same cat who routinely burns her tongue licking lightbulbs, hisses at them, and keeps licking."
comment posted at 3:27 PM on Jul-3-18

A gallery of royalty (not Hollywood Royalty, actual royal family sorts) gathered for a gala of their own set, Prince Frederik of Denmark's 50th birthday party. Not just women, but men... see how actual royals dress when they go out ot party!
comment posted at 10:55 PM on Jun-4-18

For the past few years, Julian Assange has been a guest of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, after former president Rafael Correa offered him political asylum. That said, little was known about the lengths that Ecuador would go to in order to protect Assange, or how he repaid that.

Until now.

The Guardian and Focus Ecuador have released details on Operation Hotel, the operation by Ecuadorian Intelligence to support Assange and monitor him.
comment posted at 11:55 PM on May-15-18

They packaged the parks as pristine wilderness devoid of human life.
comment posted at 4:50 PM on May-7-18

The pride of a member of the lost Sogdian Empire, this gorgeous samite shirt is decorated with "ducks wearing scarves and holding pearl necklaces in their beaks, encased in octagon motifs featuring hearts." Despite being from the 7th-9th century, it's still in excellent shape today. The auction takes place April 25th, and the shirt is expected to fetch 300,000-500,000 pounds. Nytimes article, Guardian article.
comment posted at 10:07 PM on Apr-13-18

We’ve Always Hated Girls Online: A Wayback Machine Investigation: A former fan searches for a teen girl who was once internet famous for her coding skills
comment posted at 9:37 PM on Feb-23-18

A wry disgruntlement will forever unite those of us who were children during the height of the nineteen-seventies natural-foods movement. It was a time that we recall not for its principles—yes to organics, no to preservatives—but for its endless assaults on our tender young palates. There was brown rice that scoured our molars as we chewed, shedding gritty flecks of bran. There was watery homemade yogurt that resisted all attempts to mitigate its tartness. And, at the pinnacle of our dietary suffering, worse even than sprout sandwiches or fruit leather or whole-wheat scones, there was carob, the chocolate substitute that never could.

comment posted at 7:38 AM on Feb-1-18

The first study to actually count the number of cortical neurons in the brains of a number of carnivores, including cats and dogs, has found that dogs possess significantly more of them than cats. […] The results of the study are described in a paper titled “Dogs have the most neurons, though not the largest brain: Trade-off between body mass and number of neurons in the cerebral cortex of large carnivoran species” accepted for publication in the open access journal Frontiers in Neuroanatomy.
comment posted at 10:09 PM on Nov-30-17

#Deep Space Nine Nine, source of the title and prompt for this FPP, is an entertainingly silly series of posts with dialogue from "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" on screencaps of "Deep Space Nine."
comment posted at 11:10 PM on Nov-11-17

Everyone hates e-bikes
comment posted at 5:10 PM on Nov-10-17

Remembering the Radioactive Boy Scout.
comment posted at 8:47 PM on Nov-6-17

A man with a steady job leaves it behind to start a restaurant. If at any point during reading this you think, "Eesh, what else could go wrong?" just wait a few paragraphs. You'll find out.
comment posted at 5:55 PM on Nov-5-17