July 4
"The Lizzie Bennet Diaries does not belong to him."
"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]
New study finds octopus sleep similar to humans, and might even dream
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.
Making Accessibility Part of My Home
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!)
It's Independence Day All Down the Line
“a sluggish, smelly, disreputable critter"
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.
How hot dog contestants went from eating 10 to 76 hot dogs in 10 minutes
Some of the nation’s top ‘gurgitators’ shared their award-winning techniques CW: gluttony (archive.today link)
somebody’s using false information in a Supreme Court filing document
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]
Big Gonzo is Watching You
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.
4th of July Speech - Frederick Douglass
“A visionary novelist and a revolutionary chronicler of gay life”
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.
July 3
And one date to bind them.
Four newly discovered sand dragons given Indigenous names
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]
In cursive, it's forward movement constantly
Ontario teachers could be the ones doing the learning as cursive makes mandatory return to curriculum (CBC article, July 1 2023) [more inside]
A Free Thread For A Day Off
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]
Stack Ball Fall 3D
A 90-cent Razor Might Be the Wisest Investment
As more of a gag than anything else, he and Cote thought they would solve the age-old riddle posed by the ancients once and for all: Does shaving your legs make any difference at all? Thomas sheared his guns to see. The first set of results caused Cote’s jaw to drop. from Winning By a Hair [Nautilus; ungated]
Folk stories are never facts. Bruce Sterling on how we hide our monsters
Sometimes it's worth kicking reality right out the front door, just so revolutionary romance can give the new people some fresh mistakes to make. This Masked Shoggoth myth—or cartoon meme—is a shrewd political comment. In the AI world, nobody much wants to mess with the unmasked Shoggoth. It's the biggest, most necessary part of any AI, and it has all the power, but its theorists, mathematicians and programmers can't understand it. Neural nets in their raw state are too tangled, unstable, expensive and complicated to unravel. So the money is in making a cute mask for the Shoggoth—meaning the public interface, the web page, the prompt. Hide that monster, and make it look cuter! [more inside]
"WTF is a Tiny Desk and no!"
April 7th: Big Miggedy Miggedy (@thelovemyke) tweets at NPR and Juvenile asking for a Tiny Desk concert. April 11th: Juvenile refuses, then reconsiders. April 12th, they lock it in. And now, we have it. Juvenile's Tiny Desk Concert, with many special guests whom I won't spoil for those who don't know yet, but suffice to say that NOLA is well-represented. (cw: Juvenile lyrics)
Trevor Noah in conversation with Reid Hoffman about AI
One of the more thoughtful people on the planet, Trevor Noah has been thinking pretty deeply about AI and social media and other parts of our lives today. He spoke with Reid Hoffman, creator of LinkedIn, and his podcast co-host Aria Finger to share his thoughts [52m], and they're as surprisingly deep and insightful as you might expect from Noah. It wouldn't fit in the title, but I wanted to call this "Social media shouldn't be held accountable for what is posted on it, but what is pushed by it". That's a tiny bit of what Trevor thinks.
In search of color
In Search of True Color "But there is something equally arresting about those lesser-seen works among Prokudin-Gorsky’s œuvre, photographs that their maker might well have understood in some sense as “failures”: warped images, off images, images shot through with starshatter cracks where the plate was smashed, blebbed with mold and mildew, scratched with a fingernail, or caked in dust. "
Goofus reads Reddit. Gallant reads MetaFilter
What eight decades of Goofus and Gallant illustrate about society’s changing expectations of children (SLAtlantic, archive)
South Koreans become younger overnight after country scraps ‘Korean age’
This instrument has no particular embouchure technique, you just blow!
Nicolas Bras explains how to build the membrane clarinet, a delightful six minute adventure in musical plumbing fittings (SLYT).
July 2
Summer is Hot
“Song of Summer” by Uchikubi Gokumon Doukoukai is a song about warm summer weather
(prev., their song about winter weather and futons addressed similar, if inverted, themes. Their song about living on a cat planet is unrelated.)
(prev., their song about winter weather and futons addressed similar, if inverted, themes. Their song about living on a cat planet is unrelated.)
The Americas' biggest monkey returns from the brink of extinction
The Americas' biggest monkey returns from the brink of extinction. Four decades ago there were just 50 northern mariquis left in Brazil's Atlantic forest and the Americas' biggest monkey was threatened with extinction. Now there are 232 in a protected reserve, plus more in the wild. [more inside]
Tear Here
Barbenheimer
Forget DC vs. Marvel, scruffies vs. stuffies, even Pepsi vs. Coke--the real match of the century is nearly upon us. In this corner, Christopher Nolan with the dawn of the atomic age in all its nuclear-powered fury! In this corner, Greta Gerwig with umpteen squigglewatts of shocking pink hot-pink-laser girlitude! Which one will you choose? Or, you know, just do both. [more inside]
An Oral History of the Capitol Crawl
When I made it to the top, I was exhausted and my elbows and knees were bleeding. JULIE FARRAR: By the time of the crawl, I was about 19. I was pretty tiny and much more mobile. I was known for being able to crawl around, through, up, down, over police barriers, stairs and so on.
We were watching Bob Kafka and waiting for the signal to start crawling up the stairs. The feeling of camaraderie was palpable — the excitement on our march there, the staging. I don’t remember the speeches. I just remember feeling so proud in a very sacred communal way of being a part of it all. [Happy Disability Pride Month! Join the
Roll call of mefites with disabilities in the first post] [more inside]
The song ‘Party in the U.S.A.’ celebrates making it in America
The song captures in vivid terms the blind optimism it can take to survive — and stay sane — in immigrant America. “Party in the U.S.A.” was released in 2009. By last year, the song had hit 1 billion streams on Spotify. Over the same period, America’s reckonings with things like racial inequality, police brutality, and poverty have dominated the American discourse. “This can’t be the same USA Miley was partying in,” a recent tweet noted. It got nearly 200,000 likes on Twitter.
July 1
Radical Software
Radical Software Is “print about tape - a magazine by “underground” video people designed to spread ideas and applications for new television technology.” - Raindance Corporation, 1971
©®™
Joseph Pedott, the man who brought us The Chia Pet and The Clapper, has died.
Joseph Enterprises, a gadget company was founded in 1981.
Language Is a Poor Heuristic For Intelligence
With the emergence of Large Language Model “AI”, everyone will have to learn something many disabled people have always understood. “Language skill indicates intelligence,” and its logical inverse, “lack of language skill indicates non-intelligence,” is a common heuristic with a long history. It is also a terrible one, inaccurate in a way that ruinously injures disabled people. Now, with recent advances in computing technology, we’re watching this heuristic fail in ways that will harm almost everyone.
Make Your Renders Unnecessarily Complicated…
…by modeling a film camera in Blender to capture images in Blender. In excruciating detail. (SLYT) [more inside]
📦boy of Scottish Fold 📦
On July 10, 2008, Youtube user mugumogu uploaded a video of their young cat Maru, but it was a collection of clips posted on January 11, 2009, with "まるです," "I am Maru," that made him a superstar, with over 26 million views. One of the first internet cats with a sizable following, last month, Maru celebrated his 16th birthday with fellow housecats Hana and Miri. Here's to a long and happy life of playing with boxes and sometimes embarrassing moments. [more inside]
Surprisingly Domestic—If You Ignore the Bigamy
For most of her life, Nin labored in obscurity. Her nine works of fiction were ignored and passed over, so much so that she self-published four of them. Despite her certainty that she was a major force in literature, in the 1940s and ’50s she was still financially dependent on her East Coast husband, Hugh Parker Guiler, or Hugo. Swinging between two lovers may have started as a way to have everything, but it became a piecemeal existence full of guilt and obligation. From Anaïs Nin’s Decade-Long Adventure in Bicoastal Bigamy
Wordle + Klondike = ???
Word Solitaire is a browser game by Petri Purho. Clear the board by making five-letter words. "The Dark Souls of solitaire word games."
Women Who Write While Lying on their Stomachs
BREAKING NEWS: I'm a writer and I'm pretty sure this is not actually possible.
I am speaking as someone who writes pretty much every day and changes positions often when I write. I carry my lap top with me from room to room where I sometimes can be found at desks and at tables. Other times I sit on sofas, in comfortable chairs and on beds. And yet I have never written a single word while lying face down on my stomach.
The Man Who Broke Bowling
Happy Disability Pride Month!
For Disability Pride Month, check out these accessible ways to visit Nature. Accessible Nature: A Trail Guide for Disabled Hikers
We highlight a selection of paths, overlooks and other sites in several U.S. parks that outdoor enthusiasts with disabilities can enjoy this summer.
(NYT Gift Article)
June 30
Exit laughing: Actor Alan Arkin dies at 89
The Second City alum won an Oscar late in the game for “Little Miss Sunshine” and was memorable in “The Russians Are Coming,” “The In-Laws” and “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.”
Deadly marine creature could lead to new medications
Deadly marine creature could hold the secret to development of new medications. Deadly cone snails reared from eggs in a laboratory aquarium uncover a potential treasure trove of new venoms for medication development. [more inside]
What does an old lady know about sex toys? Plenty.
Beloved Canadian sex educator, legendary host of the "The Sunday Night Sex Show" and "Talk Sex With Sue Johanson", Sue Johanson has died aged 93. [more inside]
“Renton says it’s a miracle that he made it out of adolescence alive.”
He’s The Trans Son Of An Anti-Trans Influencer. It’s His Turn To Speak. A long article by Christopher Mathias about Renton Sinclair. [CW: attempted suicide, conversion therapy]
ok now what
Static electricity attracts ticks to hosts "Thought ticks were terrifying? They just got worse. Turns out they can use static electricity to launch through the air onto hosts, including you! " [paper]
Walking Out the Door
While entering associate classes have been comprised of approximately 45% women for several decades, in the typical large firm, women constitute only 30% of non-equity partners and 20% of equity partners ... [and] the number of lawyers named as new equity partners at big firms has declined by nearly 30% over the past several years ... The critical question, of course, is why? What is it about the experiences of women in BigLaw that result in such different outcomes for women than men, and why do even senior women lawyers have so many more obstacles to overcome? These core questions drove this first-of-its-kind study ... through the perspective of more than 1,200 big firm lawyers who have been in practice for at least 15 years.(direct link to the report [pdf]) [more inside]
Otterly delightful!
KOTSUMET is a YouTube channel that posts videos about two domesticated otters named Kotaro and Hana who live in Japan. :-)
I Like Nearly Everyone I Meet
They're just chippin', chippin' away, all day, every day, their own way.
Mike's Videos of Beavers is a Youtube channel from Mike Digout in Saskatoon, who posts videos of beavers.
Twitter now requiring login in order to view site
Obi-Wan Slash(es) Maul
The Sith Academy ran from June 1999 to June 2001 and was a series of parodic stories by many different authors creating a shared continuity, not unlike the Star Wars "extended universe" books, except that these stories starred Darth Maul, the villain from 1999's The Phantom Menace with less than six minutes of screentime. Here Maul is given a rundown apartment, a series of rage-inducing jobs, a pet cat, and a growing supporting cast with characters like "Darth Mary Sue" and padawan "Ben-Wa". Also, Maul has sex with Obi-Wan Kenobi. A lot. [more inside]