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A decentralized group of safe streets activists in San Francisco realized they can disable Cruise and Waymo robotaxis by placing a traffic cone on a vehicle’s hood, and they’re encouraging others to do it, too. "This is vandalism and encourages unsafe and disrespectful behavior on our roadways,” the company said in a statement.
posted by clawsoon at 3:27 PM - 22 comments

Central Park West is a legal workplace drama that aspires to the cursed union of #MeToo revenge story and buddy-cop rib tickler. Here, Comey repackages his experiences in New York working as an assistant U.S. attorney, including a stint under Rudy Giuliani in the late 1980s, in an attempt to genetically modify the meager fruit of an appointed bureaucrat’s imagination with some vestige of intrigue. The prose is clear enough to call it a beach read, if by “beach” we mean the sunny Riker’s Island shoreline. from Comey As You Are [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:51 PM - 0 comments

Social movements ranging from Black Lives Matter to the climate movement are a fixture of political life. But what makes some social movements more successful than others? Apollo Academic Surveys surveyed 120 academic experts in Sociology, Political Science and other relevant disciplines to investigate this question. [more inside]
posted by bluesky43 at 10:29 AM - 15 comments

It's been a long difficult week. Do you need to laugh? Matteo Lane: Hair Plugs & Heartache [47m] is a stand-up set released last month. It's queer comedy with adult ideas and language. It's also, I think, very very funny.
posted by hippybear at 10:09 AM - 10 comments

For over a year, players in the Professional Women's Hockey Players' Association have been in negotiations with investment firms Billie Jean King Enterprises and the Mark Walter Group to launch a new women's hockey league. Thus, the part of their Thursday night announcement laying out plans for the new league to start play in January of 2024 wasn't a huge surprise. But the other part of the announcement was: The investment groups have also bought out the Premier Hockey Federation (formerly the National Women's Hockey League), consolidating the sport's player pool and essentially disbanding what had been the only pro women's hockey league in North America for the last four years. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 9:57 AM - 10 comments

Last year, Yuji Naka, the creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, was arrested for insider trading which occurred during his stint at Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest publisher Square Enix. After his resignation from Square Enix, he had sued the company for removing him as director on the ill-fated Balan Wonderworld. Today, Naka received a suspended prison sentence and was fined and penalized a total of 173 million yen (approx. 1.2 million USD). [more inside]
posted by May Kasahara at 8:34 AM - 6 comments

We Found & Saved 10 YEARS of Lost Video Game History [YouTube] Noclip, a Youtube channel famous for video game development documentaries, has just salvaged an entire decade of lost video game history. The findings consist of dozens of boxes filled with video tapes. The above video explains the how and what and why of it all. You can subscribe to the archive via the @NoclipArchive YouTube channel or archive.org. Highlights from the archive include: Microsoft E3 2009 Press Conference, A young Hideo Kojima interviewed about the American Metal Gear Solid 4 reveal trailer, Infinity Ward Studio Tour During Development of COD:4 Modern Warfare, Exploring Nintendo of America's Employee-Only Museum, Tony Hawk Half Pipe Demo - Games Convention 2007. [via: Destructoid]
posted by Fizz at 8:13 AM - 9 comments

Half-billion-year-old sea squirt could push back origins of vertebrates, including humans.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:54 PM - 13 comments

Guardian: 'The annual CGC (Crap Games Competition) has been bringing Spectrum fans together for more than 25 years' ... “What makes the CGC entertaining is the self-deprecating, sardonic British humour,” explains 43-year-old Paul Collins from Reading, who first entered the CGC in 2000 with Pear-Shaped (“a simple maze game where you try to collect as many pears as possible”) and Crap Football, featuring a digitised Des Lynam. “There are ideas that can’t possibly work, eg Sim City: The Text Adventure or Blind Flight Simulator. Or names that are just funny, like Whack a Nun II and European Sandwich Hunt.”
posted by Wordshore at 10:35 PM - 26 comments

The New Climate Law Is Working. Clean Energy Investments Are Soaring. "It seems clear already that the law will stimulate significantly more investment in clean energy than was at first thought possible while generating more revenue from high-income taxpayers to reduce the deficit. ... Companies have announced at least 31 new battery manufacturing projects in the United States. ... The pipeline of battery plants amounts to 1,000 gigawatt-hours per year by 2030 — 18 times the energy storage capacity in 2021, enough to support the manufacture of 10 million to 13 million electric vehicles per year. In energy production, companies have announced 96 gigawatts of new clean power over the past eight months, which is more than the total investment in clean power plants from 2017 to 2021 and enough to power nearly 20 million homes." [more inside]
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 8:16 PM - 22 comments

When Domenic Broccoli set out to expand his IHOP empire upstate, he didn’t expect to find a grave site — or start a war. By Reeves Wiedeman for Curbed. Archive link. [more inside]
posted by the primroses were over at 7:53 PM - 14 comments

All this, and still Kahlo led much of her life in her bedroom, alone. “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.” Frida Kahlo was born today in 1907. A brief biographical animation. "I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and… More flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it's true I'm here, and I'm just as strange as you.” [more inside]
posted by Bottlecap at 3:48 PM - 10 comments

Rejected GitHub Profile Achievements:

• Sith Lord: Wipe out someone else's commits by force pushing to the main branch.
• Tee Hee: In a single "minor cleanup" commit to the main branch, change every line of every file in the repository so that all open Pull Requests are unmergeable.
• Patient Skeleton: Submit a pull request to a public repository that fixes it, but its been open for at least 2 years.

[more inside]
posted by genpfault at 3:02 PM - 27 comments

No American who came of age in the nineteen-eighties — or in most of the seventies or nineties, for that matter — could pretend not to understand the importance of the mall ... Introduced as “A SAFARI TO STUDY MALL CULTURE,” Mall City consists of interviews conducted by Hugh Kinniburgh and his NYU Film School collaborators during one day in 1983 at the Roosevelt Field Mall on Long Island. Unsurprisingly, their interviewees tend to be young, strenuously coiffed, and dressed with studied nonchalance in striped T-shirts and Members Only-style windbreakers. from Open Culture [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:50 PM - 19 comments

Brief of amici curiae David Sosa, David Sosa, David Sosa, David Sosa, & the Institute For Justice in Support of Petitioner David Sosa An amicus brief filed by the Institute for Justice, composed in hopes of keeping people with the same name as criminal suspects from having their rights violated. More information on Techdirt.
posted by N8yskates at 1:59 PM - 23 comments

A list of good things. "...dirt paths and the way dirt lies at the base of tree roots, the internet, babies laughing uncontrollably, the sound of sprinklers, mohair sweaters..." By Holly K. Hein.
posted by brainwane at 1:15 PM - 5 comments

Following the chimera out of the dead soil of the human will be an unnerving experience. "But that’s precisely how we’ll know we’re on the right path." Leo Kim asks us to think beyond Donna Haraway's cyborg, and towards a speculative monster better suited for our time. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 12:48 PM - 10 comments

Threads is live. The Meta/Instagram "Twitter killer" supposedly had 30 million installs in 24 hours (Mastodon may have less than 2M active users), likely thanks to the ability to access your entire Instagram social graph automatically. Gruber likes it, but not as much as BlueSky (which is still in closed beta) The Threads website doesn't show content by default, but you can access individual users and tweets toots skeets threads. On the other hand, maybe the age of social media is ending.
posted by gwint at 10:58 AM - 182 comments

If you watched the TV series Hawkeye, you might remember Rogers: The Musical [4m30s]. If this whet your appetite for show tunes and superheroes, then Marvel has done right by you. [That Captain America musical from Hawkeye is becoming a real stage show, AV Club] Here is Rogers: The Musical in full [32m, , quality audience recording, ancillary material before timestamp and after performance]. The power of Disney knows no limits. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 10:08 AM - 14 comments

The World May Have Just Experienced the Hottest Day Ever Recorded [Time] The entire planet sweltered to the unofficial hottest day in human recordkeeping July 3, according to University of Maine scientists at the Climate Reanalyzer project. High temperature records were surpassed July 3 and 4 in Quebec and northwestern Canada and Peru. Cities across the U.S. from Medford, Oregon to Tampa, Florida have been hovering at all-time highs, said Zack Taylor, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. Beijing reported 9 straight days last week when the temperature exceeded 35°C (95°F). This global record is preliminary, pending approval from gold-standard climate measurement entities like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. [Bonus: Wiki-list of weather records] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:22 AM - 52 comments

During mating season, a group of [male echidnas] will start following a female, forming a line that can last several weeks.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 12:04 AM - 11 comments

This Australian high school's human head and a mysterious note pose questions about ancient Egypt. With mystery surrounding its origins, the mummified head poses all sorts of questions about the past.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:39 PM - 10 comments

On July 1st, G/O Media (previously, previously, previously, previously, previously) announced they would be publishing articles created by AI. Today, under the byline Gizmodo Bot, the first AI article, an error riddled chronological listing of Star Wars stories was published. The James Whitbrook, deputy editor of Gizmodo and io9 responded, releasing a statement. (sorry, Twitter link) Note, the article in question has not been linked. There's no need for it to get any more clicks.
posted by Ghidorah at 9:32 PM - 99 comments

In 1936, Edwin Denby co- wrote: "Horse Eats Hat" with one Orson Welles, age 21. Denby was a dance critic and poet. 'Denby and Balanchine: A Dance Critic’s Work'. 'On an Edwin Denby NYC Traffic Sonnet' is a wonderful look at one of his poems. The Folks at Pennsound has a collection of spoken material. In 2016, the NYPL staff contributed, 'Edwin Denby: Memory, History and Documentation'.
posted by clavdivs at 8:25 PM - 1 comment

[MLYT] During his run on Late Night, David Letterman would do intros before reruns - but occasionally, he'd go a little further. Speeding up the episode to cram extra footage in, watching the episode alongside the viewer and offering commentary... but these pale in comparison to the time he had a rerun redubbed by different people - including voice actors from the 60's Speed Racer dub. [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 7:09 PM - 16 comments

The LLMentalist Effect: How chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con.
posted by ursus_comiter at 6:01 PM - 34 comments

"Each pin represents the approximate location of one of 142 homicides that occurred in the City of London in the first half of the 14th century. Click on a pin to read the story behind the event." One can filter by gender of victim, private or public location, year, weapon and ward, and switch between two maps of different dates. There are statistics by gender, occupation, day of the week, social space etc. There is a video about the project, and media coverage when this was published in 2018 included articles in the Guardian and the Smithsonian magazine.
posted by paduasoy at 2:46 PM - 11 comments

They wanted it because they’d just gone through a bad breakup and needed an edge in the volatile dating market; because porn had warped their sense of scale; because they’d been in a car accident, or were looking to fix a curve, or were hoping for a little “software upgrade”; because they were not having a midlife crisis; because they were, “and it was cheaper than a Bugatti Veyron”; because, after five kids, their wife couldn’t feel them anymore; because they’d been molested as a child and still remembered the laughter of the adults in the room; because they couldn’t forget a passing comment their spouse made in 1975; because, despite the objections of their couples therapist, they believed it would bring them closer to their “sex obsessed” husband (who then had an affair that precipitated their divorce); because they’d stopped changing in locker rooms, stopped peeing in urinals, stopped having sex; because who wouldn’t want it? from Inside the Secretive World of Penile Enlargement [ProPublica & The New Yorker; ungated] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:43 PM - 39 comments

We knew he was not benevolent exactly (well, some of us knew) but there was the sense that he was suffering on the same side as us. Why we believed we were reading him for moral instruction in the first place I have no idea, but it did prefigure the primary way we construct morality now: to be paying attention. To everything. That means you.

–Where be your jibes now? is an essay by MeFi’s own Patricia Lockwood about David Foster Wallace.
posted by Kattullus at 2:16 PM - 44 comments

There's a new collection of Stories From The Readership at Ask A Manager, and this time, the topic is the petty moments readers remember from work. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:12 PM - 26 comments

Popular since collectors first obsessed over it in Victorian England, the charismatic orchid now commands millions of dollars in research. Far from just pretty faces, orchids are allowing scientists to ask fundamental questions about how plants interact with other species in their environment and about the very nature of ecology and how we classify organisms. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 11:01 AM - 7 comments

Rick Froberg, co-founding member of bands Drive Like Jehu and Hot Snakes has died at the age of 55, announced his long-time friend and collaborator John Reis. Appreciations from NPR ("Rick Froberg was the perfect punk vocalist"), Pitchfork ("5 Essential Songs"), and The Guardian ("Froberg was a lightning rod") [more inside]
posted by gwint at 10:37 AM - 19 comments

Former VP/Creative Services for Warner Bros, Laura LiPuma, recounts her career in graphic design [3h11m, CW: Prince stories], from her uprooting to leave for Los Angeles, her freelancing years, and finally getting hired at WB. Starting with the 1999 era and going through Lovesexy, she's responsible for the look and feel of much of how Prince presented through his music release imagery.
posted by hippybear at 10:06 AM - 4 comments

Subway to switch to freshly-sliced meats (Today). The largest sandwich chain in the US (Nation's Restaurant News), which is also rolling out new sandwiches (CNN, Food Network), is currently for sale (Reuters). No changes have been announced to the 'bread.'
posted by box at 8:12 AM - 108 comments

"Please be informed, the notification read, that your business, the Sunlight Cafe, has been designated a Moderately Impactful Business. This replaces your current designation as a Negligibly Impactful Business. The Moderately Impactful Business designation comes with increased governance requirements which are listed below. Note that our decision may be appealed and is considered probationary until the appeals process is complete." In the short scifi story "Sunlight" by Shauna Gordon-McKeon, one woman loves that the little café she runs with her wife has become a community space. But her wife doesn't. [Disclaimer: Shauna is a friend.]
posted by brainwane at 6:10 AM - 13 comments

The Best Reviewed Games of 2023 (So Far) [IGN] The snowball of games delayed out of 2021 and 2022 has settled in 2023, coalescing into the most exciting games lineup of the decade so far. 2023, arguably, marks the proper start of the PS5 and Xbox Series X generation with Unreal Engine 5 support building and an increasing number of developers dropping support for last-gen hardware. Each of the three console manufacturers has at least one blockbuster release scheduled this year — Starfield for Xbox, Spider-Man 2 for PlayStation, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom for Nintendo — complemented by a generation-best third-party lineup that includes Hogwarts Legacy, Resident Evil 4, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Street Fighter 6, Diablo 4, Final Fantasy 16, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Hades 2, and Mortal Kombat 1. Five Six months through 2023 and already the year has lived up to its lofty expectations.
posted by Fizz at 5:18 AM - 49 comments

"The whole story of why we'll never get an LBD movie." Over a year ago, Ashley Clements started producing The Look Back Diaries. After all of the episodes were discussed, she's started discussing the behind-the-scenes tea, specifically with regards to Bernie Su screwing her and the other Pemberley Digital castmates out of a lot of money and in the last episode, categorically ending hopes of a movie. [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:14 PM - 5 comments

New study finds octopus sleep similar to humans, and might even be dreaming. The study found the octopuses had a similar sleep pattern to REM which is when most mammals dream.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:29 PM - 22 comments

The sweet vulnerability of creating an accessible home with the person you love and the tenderness towards yourself it requires “That’s how I feel about anyone seeing proof of my disabilities before I’ve wrapped my head around the fact of the disabilities: like I’ve reached a fragile peace with it, and any harsh comment, any misguided sentiment, any gawking could wreck my growing understanding and acceptance of how much I’ve changed.” (Happy Disability Pride Month!)
posted by Bottlecap at 5:58 PM - 17 comments

It's the 4th of July [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:40 PM - 14 comments

Indeed, opossums are odd, a creature an exhausted God might have thrown together with parts leftover from a busy week of creation. Whatever He had lying around the shop (grippy hands, snaky tail, crippling anxiety), He chucked into the opossum and sent it down to the Garden of Eden to tip over Adam’s garbage cans and eat the cat food off Eve’s back porch.
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:00 PM - 48 comments

Some of the nation’s top ‘gurgitators’ shared their award-winning techniques CW: gluttony (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 9:50 AM - 40 comments

The recent SCOTUS decision 303 CREATIVE LLC ET AL. v. ELENIS ET AL. [PDF link, decision] was decided on the basis that Laurie Smith might be asked to make a gay wedding website. In the original court filings was included a possible inquiry about such a website that included a name and phone number and other identifying information. The New Republic called that phone number, and reports that is false information. Maybe SCOTUS will reexamine it, Salon summarizes thinking about that. NYT's The Daily discusses the case and context for a half hour. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:21 AM - 114 comments

Do you love your cloud-connected personal assistant, but wish it had a bit more of a Jim Henson than a George Orwell vibe? Are you good with a soldering iron? Maybe you'd like to try your hand at building your own Animatronic Alexa.
posted by Popular Ethics at 8:43 AM - 12 comments

An often overlooked insight on this "holiday."
posted by Scout405 at 8:34 AM - 11 comments

I got to know a man willing to discuss nearly anything but his own literary significance. Openly sharing the most intimate minutiae of his life—finances, hookup apps, Depends—he recoiled with Victorian modesty whenever I asked why he’d written his books or what they meant to his readers. “I write, I don’t speculate about what I’m writing,” he reminded me a bit sharply after an interpretative question. For Delany, decency entails remembering that the author is dead even when he’s sitting across the table.

–How Samuel R. Delany Reimagined Sci-Fi, Sex, and the City by Julian Lucas.
posted by Kattullus at 1:31 AM - 40 comments

"Born and Died on the 4th of July" [more inside]
posted by clavdivs at 11:28 PM - 9 comments

Four newly discovered sand dragons given Indigenous names from South Australian regions. New research from museums in the Northern Territory and South Australia found a total of 11 sand dragon species, with four of those completely new to science. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:19 PM - 8 comments

Ontario teachers could be the ones doing the learning as cursive makes mandatory return to curriculum (CBC article, July 1 2023) [more inside]
posted by readinghippo at 9:36 PM - 144 comments

Because many MeFites have a day off this week, and because for many OTHER MeFites Tuesday is just Tuesday - here is your Free Thread for the first week of July! [more inside]
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:00 PM - 87 comments