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I've watched a LOT of stuff related to Barbie. Panels and interviews and contrived videos... but I'm going to say that Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera on Barbie | BFI in conversation [40m] is the single most grounded, real-feeling conversation I've seen. Ryan and America seem to be sitting with a small group of friends talking about this experience they both went through, and it just feels so honest and bare and naked... Hard to describe, great to experience.
posted by hippybear at 6:51 PM - 0 comments

The Cheapest Places to Live in 2024. "By moving from where you are to where you could be, it’s easy to cut your monthly rent in half (or double your apartment space), cut your healthcare costs drastically if you’re American, eat out more, and have more fun. You’ll probably discover some positive side effects like eating more fruit and vegetables (because they’re so cheap), getting more exercise (because many foreign cities are more suited to pedestrians), and dialing back your stress (because people aren’t in such a hurry all the time)."
posted by storybored at 6:42 PM - 8 comments

Laser-sensor technology reveals ancient cities in Ecuador's Amazon rainforest. The settlements were occupied around 500 BC and 300 to 600 AD — a period roughly contemporaneous with the Roman Empire in Europe.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:52 PM - 1 comment

The Professional Women's Hockey League is now in its second week of operation. Live games can be found on their Youtube channel, including the third period of Boston at Montreal happening right now.
posted by clawsoon at 2:57 PM - 5 comments

He spent his life building a $1 million stereo. The real cost was unfathomable. Ken Fritz turned his home into an audiophile’s dream — the world’s greatest hi-fi. What would it mean in the end? [more inside]
posted by bq at 9:24 AM - 69 comments

Why watch heads never set the time on their watches.
posted by rory at 7:13 AM - 69 comments

New laws aren’t meant to be exciting – but this one could sedate a buffalo.
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:34 AM - 14 comments

Created by Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, AI-powered news app Artifact is no more. A statement from Systrom on the closure.
posted by mittens at 5:43 AM - 9 comments

Macadamias as rare as the Wollemi pine get new national recovery plan. A plan of action is adopted to help save the world's only wild macadamia plants from extinction. Among other reasons, preserving wild macadamias is important in case pathogens like viruses or fungi wipe out the genetic monoculture that is commercially-cultivated macadamias.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:30 AM - 0 comments

You want tomorrow to be different than today, and it may seem the same, or worse, but next year will be different than this one, because those tiny increments added up. The tree today looks a lot like the tree yesterday, and so does the baby. A lot of change is undramatic growth, transformation, or decay, or rather its timescale means the drama might not be perceptible to the impatient. from Slow Change Can Be Radical Change by Rebecca Solnit
posted by chavenet at 2:17 AM - 11 comments

As fat women, we may be a cheap, tasty snack, not a proper meal, then: the sexual equivalent of junk food. They’ll throw away the wrapper and brush away the crumbs, sated but vaguely disgusted — with both us and themselves — when they are done with us. Our bodies may be desired but deemed low-status, then, rendering us disposable. Fat women are regarded by some men as fuckable but not loveable.
posted by Francies at 12:52 AM - 11 comments

This week, the world’s most-skilled Age of Empires II players are gathered in an apartment in Berlin. On Twitch alone, over 30,000 people are watching live.
posted by one for the books at 10:14 PM - 11 comments

Voting begins in Taiwan's critical elections watched closely by China - "Polls opened on Saturday in Taiwan's presidential and parliamentary elections which China has framed as a choice between war and peace and are happening as Beijing ramps up pressure to get the island to accept its sovereignty. Taiwan has been a democratic success story since holding its first direct presidential election in 1996, the culmination of decades of struggle against authoritarian rule and martial law."[1,2,3] [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 7:21 PM - 12 comments

AI is keeping watch day and night to help protect Australia's forests from bushfires (forest fires). From detecting smoke rising from timber plantations to scanning bushwalkers' photos to assess fuel loads, artificial intelligence is becoming an essential part of protecting the nation's forests.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:16 PM - 8 comments

Rockets of the world
posted by chavenet at 2:18 PM - 26 comments

I feel like the Rolling Stone article Lily Gladstone Is Seizing the Moment — and Making History manifests Gladstone into the perfect person for right now for me. I haven't seen the film yet, but I've seen some interviews and this article expanded and confirmed a lot to me -- she's a very deliberate actor who is making careful and masterful choices. I can't wait to see what she does next.
posted by hippybear at 1:59 PM - 4 comments

Sometimes wrong numbers work. On the East African savanna, Maasai herders can form important new social connections when they misdial their mobile phones, a new study of these communities found. Maasai have traditionally lived in relatively independent, homogeneous groups, but these misdials introduce them to strangers near and far. And some even become friends or business partners. When asked why people use phones this way, one respondent commented, “Good things happen.”
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:39 AM - 11 comments

From Futurism: New product listings are appearing on Amazon that appear to be AI-generated, with names like "I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy. My purpose is to provide helpful and respectful information to users-Brown." "It raises the question: is anyone at Amazon actually reviewing products that appear on its site?" [more inside]
posted by mittens at 9:30 AM - 65 comments

Dr Cat Hicks' Covid Data Log. "I'm not an artist or a designer, but I have this -- writing has always been one of the ways I have to make sense of the world. And truly looking at human experience is to me the highest duty of care that a psychologist has. Maybe someone has been where I was and needs to hear that someone cares. I care a lot. I am lucky to be alive and even more to be loved while I am alive. May you have the same."
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:06 AM - 7 comments

Why 'doing your own research' often backfires. [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 7:58 AM - 67 comments

As ChatGPT gets “lazy,” people test “winter break hypothesis” as the cause
posted by clawsoon at 7:40 AM - 53 comments

Te shares scripts one can use in a medical setting to make it more likely one will get adequate pain medication and mobility devices; other Tumblr writers share additional tips on bringing a patient advocate ("medibuddy"), bringing written notes and defending using notes, etc. "Remember not to use too *much* *correct* medical jargon — they get suspicious about that."
posted by brainwane at 4:54 AM - 37 comments

Our results show that, unlike the javelin, the atlatl equalizes the velocity of female- and male-launched projectiles. This result indicates that a javelin to atlatl transition would have promoted a unification, rather than division, of labor. More new research on prehistoric women as hunters. Gender politics as imagined in fiction set in prehistory. Finally, the 'Venus of Willendorf' is always worth consideration. [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:43 AM - 31 comments

Tonight marks the 125th anniversary of an epic RNLI feat to provide succour to the Forrest Hall a full rigged ship rudderless in the Bristol Channel. With adverse waves at their station, Jack Crocombe, the Coxswain of the Lynmouth lifeboat elected to haul their 10 ton 10 m boat Louisa through the storm, at night, 13 miles = 20 km across the moorland, and launch from Porlock Weir 11 hours later. [more inside]
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:40 AM - 12 comments

When we talk about exclamation points, people often think we’re talking about tone. But what goes unsaid is that tone is the performance of niceness or seriousness. It is the work of matching sentence structure to gender norms, industry norms, workplace norms, and generational norms. It is switching norms dozens if not hundreds of times a day, as you shift from text to email, from group chat to professional Teams Message. And we are doing this Tone Work exponentially more than at any point in history. from A Theory of the Modern Exclamation Point! [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:30 AM - 21 comments

How London Transport’s roundel was nearly a rabbit. London’s transport is world-famous for its roundel, but just under a century ago, it nearly became a rabbit – Wilfred the Rabbit.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:12 PM - 9 comments

[Jad] Sleiman, 34, was working as a reporter at WHYY, a Philadelphia-based NPR member station, last January when he was fired because executives had seen clips of his stand-up, which he said they called “egregious” violations of the outlet’s policies. [Washington Post]

“When a news organization says you’re a racist, bigot, whatever, people believe them,” he said. “So it was a lot of abuse from a lot of people who have never met me, who’ve never seen my stand-up just saw what WHYY said about me, which is not great.” [ABC News] [more inside]
posted by riruro at 7:38 PM - 24 comments

T-Pain - On Top Of The Covers (Live From The Sun Rose). Classic songs, fresh arrangements, tight backing band, intimate venue, charming banter (some NSFW/triggering language), no autotune.
posted by HeroZero at 5:04 PM - 12 comments

Tom Van Winkle (01/10/2024), "Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons": "Fifty years ago this month, the first 1000 copies of the original Dungeons & Dragons were printed and then boxed up at Gary Gygax's house. It's supposed to have been late in January of 1974, but we don't have a specific date. January 1974 is good enough for me. And what counts as the specific origin date, anyway? The final draft? The actual printing? The availability for sale? We're close enough. I'm saying it's been fifty years right now." [more inside]
posted by Wobbuffet at 2:36 PM - 53 comments

The team at Dreaming Spanish use Comprehensible Input to help learners acquire Spanish the way most children learn their first language - by listening to real native speakers.
posted by sleepy psychonaut at 1:47 PM - 35 comments

announcement Probable new owner: Bending Spoons - "a technology company that owns and develops a suite of category-leading consumer products including Remini (an AI-powered photo enhancer), Splice (a mobile video editor), and Evernote..."
posted by amtho at 1:40 PM - 25 comments

Sometime last year, the World Gold Council tapped Idris Elba to host a corporate documentary about the gold industry; it was released in October. Yesterday, Dan Olson of Folding Ideas released his own documentary about that documentary and the gold industry overall. [more inside]
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:24 PM - 6 comments

The Monday (and the week) after the last weekend of NFL regulation play is called Black Monday, as it is typically the day that head coaches around the league either get handed their pink slips or announce their departures. While a number of the dismissals were expected, such as Atlanta, Washington, and Tennessee dismissing their coaches, this year has seen a number of surprise departures in both the professional and college levels, with Pete Carroll, Bill Belichick, and Nick Saban all departing their head coach positions. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:29 AM - 36 comments

Predator: Dark Ages

Regarding the mystic power of a ludicrous sci fi one off featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger on generations of wannabe monster movie auteurs. Excluding of course any reference to the execrable corporate mashups of all things Alien vs. Predator and their occasionally molecular acidic ilk for all the obvious they suck reasons. [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 10:23 AM - 21 comments

Every January, there's a new Australia Day lamb ad. This years is about the generation gap.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:09 AM - 23 comments

It is not common to have a dual emergence between Broods XIII and XIX. They occur once every 221 years and the last time these two broods emerged together was in 1803.
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:29 AM - 59 comments

“Elon’s concept that SpaceX is on this mission to go to Mars as fast as possible and save humanity permeates every part of the company." CW: Descriptions and a few photos of injuries. “SpaceX’s idea of safety is: ‘We’ll let you decide what’s safe for you,’ which really means there was no accountability,” said Carson, who has worked for more than two decades in dangerous jobs such as building submarines. “That’s a terrible approach to take in industrial environments.”
posted by chaiminda at 3:25 AM - 136 comments

Comics I Loved In 2023 by Ritesh Babu [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:16 AM - 10 comments

Articles asking us to feel sympathy for families barely scraping by on healthy six-figure incomes may be staples of the financial press, but it’s rare that they come packaged as real-world case studies attached to flesh-and-blood individuals. But that’s what happened just before Christmas... Clarence Thomas and the bottomless self-pity of the upper classes
posted by Artw at 9:42 PM - 72 comments

Sydney funnel-web spider Hercules sets record for largest specimen collected in Australia. With fangs that could pierce a human fingernail, the largest male specimen of the world's most venomous arachnid has found a new home at the Australian Reptile Park where it will be milked for venom to make antivenom. Since the inception of the antivenom program in 1981, there has not been a fatality in Australia from a funnel-web spider bite.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:34 PM - 15 comments

The magnificent, minimalist avant-garde composer and filmmaker Phill Niblock, who explored microtones like nobody else, died a few days ago at age 90. (Pitchfork obit/The Quietus obit.) Niblock's austere yet playful compositions, which he preferred to have performed at high volumes, are truly felt as much as heard. To honor his legacy, The Wire has made a 2006 article on him free for 30 days. [more inside]
posted by Dr. Wu at 3:55 PM - 13 comments

Terry Bisson, award winning SFF author of short stories such as Bears Discover Fire and They're Made Out of Meat (video) has passed away. [more inside]
posted by Hactar at 3:17 PM - 53 comments

Invisible Ink: At the CIA’s Creative Writing Group A mildly-interesting piece by Johannes Lichtman in the well-known CIA cutout, The Paris Review.
posted by slogger at 1:46 PM - 14 comments

I don't know what I was expecting when I sat down to watch Bill Hader on Anxiety, Imposter Syndrome and Leaning Into Discomfort [1h20m], from the Ten Percent Happier podcast but what I got was a bare-bones confessional of a man who suffers deeply from anxiety even while he lives one of the most public lives in the country. I think I needed to watch this, and maybe you need to watch it also.
posted by hippybear at 1:02 PM - 9 comments

"David Lynch’s 1984 sci-fi epic Dune is—in many ways—a misbegotten botch job. Still, as with more than a few ineffectively ambitious films before it, the artistic flourishes Lynch grafted onto Frank Herbert’s sprawling Machiavellian narrative of warring space dynasties have earned it true cult classic status. Today, fans of the film, which earned a paltry $30 million at the box office and truly bruising reviews upon its release, still wonder what Lynch would have done if given the opportunity to adapt the next two novels in Herbert’s cycle: Dune Messiah and Children of Dune."
posted by brundlefly at 11:50 AM - 66 comments

Community science helps us unlock some pretty quirky aspects of the natural world, and those discoveries often come from unlikely places. Take year 3 student Emma Glenfield, who started with a simple question about magpies and wound up conducting some cutting-edge research almost by accident. 8-year-old Emma wanted to know: is there anything about people's appearance that connects people most often swooped on by Australian magpies defending their nests? When 30,000 people answered her question online, she found that people with thinning hair or no hair at all are much more likely to have been swooped on. (She also found out that Australians in her survey really love magpies, despite the swooping.) [more inside]
posted by sciatrix at 11:12 AM - 34 comments

The Monsters Know What They're Doing is a blog that examines all of the D&D 5th Edition monsters, according to their rulebook stats and descriptions, and offers strategy ideas for the interested DM.
posted by JHarris at 9:37 AM - 30 comments

Rebecca Heineman on Blue Sky today: "Until we meet again… Jennell Jaquays 10/14/1956 - 01/10/2024." Intro to a 2022 interview: "an accomplished artist whose works were published in many D&D and other products; her adventures the Dark Tower and Caverns of Thracia are held up to this day as examples of the best in dungeon design, and after working in the tabletop industry moved over to computer gaming where she worked on the Quake franchise." In 2017, she was inducted into the Gaming Hall of Fame. RPGGeek entry listing her many publications. Memorial threads at EN World, r/RPG, and r/OSR.
posted by Wobbuffet at 9:34 AM - 26 comments

From 2008 to 2012 Bob Skelding drove a team hauling a caravan 9000 miles through the United States and published tales to his blog and published a free ebook on everything you need to go wagoneering. His only goal:

to see new places, meet plenty of nice people like yourself, and to enjoy this great country of ours like it’s meant to be enjoyed, but I found out that my travels and the horses positively affected the lives of countless people

posted by Mitheral at 7:31 AM - 16 comments

Scientists creating dictionary of saltwater croc sounds capture reptilian love song on tape. Spouting water, hissing and blowing bubbles might not work for humans on the dating scene, but according to Sunshine Coast researchers, for saltwater crocodiles it's a different story.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:50 AM - 5 comments