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Zeynep Tufekci in the New York Times: "That core principle of liberty, the right to be free of intrusions and surveillance of this scope and scale, needs to be defended against the new technologies that have undermined it so gravely." [more inside]
posted by blue shadows at 11:16 PM - 1 comment

History Hit brings us Dan Snow being shown around Westminster Abbey by Sir David Cannadine, and it's a history lesson, an architectural tour, and a pilgrimage all rolled into 28 minutes. Enlightening and fun!
posted by hippybear at 7:55 PM - 4 comments

Johnny Cash was born in Kingsland, Arkansas, and so the city put his silhouette on the town water tower. On Monday, a man was arrested for shooting a hole in the water tower.
posted by MtDewd at 6:07 PM - 31 comments

"Once upon a time, the world was cruel, and there was a witch who knew it well. And so, she sold her heart away and built a house in the woods where the world could never find her. At first she would let no one into her fortress. But in the long march of days, a strange thing happened: in her own cold and spiteful way, the witch made a friend... and then another... and then several more, until her house was teeming with colorful faces and complicated lives. The house would come to be known as Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, and it would last for a very long time." [more inside]
posted by Ipsifendus at 2:09 PM - 2 comments

The Long, Slow Death of Lehman Brothers. You would think that Lehman Brothers, the bankrupt firm that inaugurated the financial crisis of 2008 would be dead and buried by now. Not so. "About that same time, on the seventh floor[the day of the bankruptcy], there was a run on the on-site snack shop. Staffers were panic-buying fruit and chocolate bars, afraid that the payment cards they loaded with cash would become worthless. Some returned to their desk with arms full of bananas. It was a microcosm of what Lehman’s administrators would be doing for the next 14 years: answering questions from people who had claims on Lehman—not lunch cards, but bonds—and then deciding how many bananas they could give them. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 1:41 PM - 20 comments

For your late night chill-out phantasmagoria needs, may I offer some sick tunes & some sick toons?: DWIG — Orange Evening; Daniel Norgren — Howling Around My Happy Home (Margee Rework); Dead Pirates — UGO (warning: dumb toon boobery at the end); Mcbaise — Water Slide (feat. Kamggarn). [more inside]
posted by taz at 12:41 PM - 2 comments

Science Education in an Age of Misinformation, a 51 page report (pdf). Co-author Carl Bergstrom summarizes in a Twitter thread: [Science] textbooks largely traffic in certainties—the settled "facts" of last year's science. This can be terribly disorienting when science-in-the-making is suddenly thrust into public view by ongoing events... Students need to know about how scientists manage uncertainty. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:18 PM - 17 comments

TheBaseMesh by Tim Steer: Whether you need a mesh for Digital Sculpting, creating a High or Low poly model, Game Prototyping, draw-overs for concepting or any other creative endeavour, this [CO0-licensed, weekly updated] asset library has you covered. Every model adheres to real-world scale and comes with basic UVs, so you can get to making those all-important creative decisions faster. ZIP files contain both .FBX and .OBJ files. Happy creating!
posted by Going To Maine at 11:14 AM - 2 comments

Greek composer Evángelos Odysséas Papathanassíou, noted for the soundtracks of Blade Runner and Chariots Of Fire, and compositions honoring the NASA's 2001 Mars Orbiter mission and the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission among many, many others, and better known as Vangelis, has died. [more inside]
posted by mhoye at 10:58 AM - 71 comments

In the back end of Tajikistan seems like there is an ugly police action underway. Badakshan is the "other half" of Tajikisan, home of the Pamirians. They are ethnically distinct from the Tajiks and are Ismailis (followers of the Aga Khan) so they tend not to mix with the majority Tajiks so much, despite meddling since the 70s at least. So why is this ugly thing happening?
posted by Meatbomb at 7:44 AM - 9 comments

The pro-Depp, anti-Heard stance is now a dominant trend on social media. What is with these people? (SLAtlantic)
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:51 AM - 214 comments

Ant Game! Place anthills and see how much food your ants can collect before time runs out. Make your own maps in Sandbox mode. Compete against the world in Daily Challenges.
posted by MetaFilter World Peace at 6:42 AM - 16 comments

This Hacktivist Site Lets You Prank-Call Russian Officials [archive] To protest the war in Ukraine, WasteRussianTime.today auto-dials Russian government officials, connects them to each other, and lets you listen in to their confusion.
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 4:50 AM - 13 comments

Disconnect from work and let the horses of Iceland reply to your emails while you are on vacation. (Seriously)
posted by chavenet at 3:47 AM - 22 comments

The Diablo Sandwich was first ordered by Sheriff Buford T. Justice at the Old Hickory House BBQ joint during a pause in his pursuit of The Bandit. It is washed down with a Dr Pepper and eaten while you are in a God Damn Hurry. Variously described as a pulled pork sandwich, an executive burger, or a jazzed-up Sloppy Joe, most variations are a combination of beef, tomato sauce and sour crème, though a forensically detailed analysis concludes with 'for the purist, one must use Trappey's hot sauce'. Recipes: Oakland County Moms, Cook Gem, Vaya. Previously.
posted by Wordshore at 3:16 AM - 25 comments

Futel: Free Public Telephony in the name of Social Justice. "Denial of telephony services has long been a tactic used against undesirable populations, and our devices will counteract that. But more importantly, we will help to establish a new era of communication, one in which reaching out is not only desirable, but mandatory." In a nutshell, Futel fixes up old public telephone booths, and then resituates them back into public spaces so that Anyone can call Anyone again, and be able to stick their used gum in the plastic folder that used to hold a phone book. Here's a HOPE talk from 2018: "Futel: A Technology So Advanced We Leave It Out On The Street All Night"
posted by not_on_display at 9:16 PM - 9 comments

Can Labor Unionists Be Style Icons? John Elward has been documenting the stylishness of union workers on his Twitter account DrippedOutTradeUnionists and argues that "Drip can be very much an organizing tactic". [more inside]
posted by toastyk at 4:06 PM - 20 comments

Mike Douglass interviews Carrie, Mark, and Harrison [14m] sometime soon after the 1977 release of their film. The interview weird and young and charming. Everyone seems overwhelmed, and everyone is still having to explain the movie when they talk about it.
posted by hippybear at 4:05 PM - 23 comments

Harrowing, yet interesting, video shot from a car while a brush fire came towards the road they were traveling on.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 2:22 PM - 11 comments

The Final Dance in Dirty Dancing, But They're Dancing to The Muppet Show theme (SLTweet)
posted by box at 12:39 PM - 28 comments

This is a single link to a thoughtful twitter thread about choosing not to kill a a spider.
posted by eotvos at 9:47 AM - 40 comments

PMG: Making Sense of VRchat, the 'Metaverse' people actually like. An excellent overview on VRChat, what makes it work, its pitfalls, and what makes it so appealing in comparison to the type of environment Meta/Facebook envisions.
posted by Philipschall at 9:39 AM - 13 comments

Hell has frozen over. "Finland and Sweden submitted letters Wednesday [today] formally applying to join NATO, a historic moment for two countries that held fast to military nonalignment until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine upended their thinking about security." [more inside]
posted by bendy at 5:03 AM - 68 comments

Struggle for Pleasure, by Wim Mertens (Antwerp, 2005) (Tenerife Symphony Orchestra, 2008) (Brussels, 2015) was originally released in 1983. The piece influenced 1993's Café Del Mar by Energy 52 (original) (higher quality radio version) which has undergone numerous remixes e.g. Paul Oakenfield's remix, Paul van Dyk's SHINE remix, Michael Woods remix.
posted by Wordshore at 1:09 AM - 13 comments

She's scared. This performance of a song written only a week ago, before studio heads, will determine if the movie is made. She's hiding behind her music stand. And she starts singing. And the music takes her. And she steps out. And she sings to the backup singers, and you see their eyes light up and they reflect it back at her. And the energy begins to reflect, and spread, and take control of everyone in the room. "This is Me."
posted by MollyRealized at 10:02 PM - 23 comments

The ghost in the machine - Army PSYOPS recruitment video appears (Army Times). The Army has a PSYOPS group, and they need people, and on their YouTube channel they have posted a recruitment video that in three minutes creates a quite harrowing mood. They say that they will show who’s pulling the strings, and they do, dark silhouettes, of people here and there, maybe around the world, maybe here, but all faceless, and in dark spaces. All centered on a Fleischer Brothers cartoon of Koko the Clown, rotoscoped from a film of Cab Calloway, turning into the ghost in the machine. But you know, that might be an interesting job?
posted by njohnson23 at 8:07 PM - 42 comments

"I’ve no fixed place on account of I’m often late from my shift." "Churched" by Maria Farrell is a short story that is about, among other things, "the marooned generations of Irish in London – people who came over from the 1950s onward, pushed out by economic and social stagnation, and who rarely got home again." And resolving a little mystery about a man who starts acting oddly in church. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 6:01 PM - 5 comments

The truth is, the Marcos victory was largely a democratic outcome in the narrow electoral sense, and the challenge for progressives is to understand why the runaway majority of the electorate voted to bring an unrepentant thieving family back to power after 36 years. How could democracy produce such a wayward outcome? [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 5:02 PM - 19 comments

!!! (chk chk chk) reinterprets a familiar REM tune in a way you wouldn't expect.
posted by Kitteh at 2:43 PM - 26 comments

Matthew McCormack describes encountering a delivery robot in the woods. That is all.
posted by elkevelvet at 2:16 PM - 17 comments

David Cronenberg goes to a video store and talks about some of his favorite movies. (23-minute video, includes a few NSFW film clips)
posted by Gerald Bostock at 2:01 PM - 8 comments

The Calgary Stampede has released its lineup of midway food for 2022. From Bad-Breath Lemonade ("ice-cold lemonade with a smooth, delicious garlic and caramelized onion finish") to Kraft Dinner soft serve ("the familiar taste of macaroni and cheese combined with a creamy coolness of soft-serve ice cream), stunt foods are well-represented along with twists on old classics, such as Nanaimo bar mini donuts ("mini donuts topped with chocolate syrup, vanilla custard, shaved sweet coconut, and a choice of coconut crème").
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:34 PM - 40 comments

A number of restaurants are betting that Americans want to get gussied up again, but not everyone is thrilled about the fashion screening. “There are rules and then there are rules,” she said. “You know when Tom Fontana comes here, he is a neighborhood regular, he wrote ‘Oz,’ he is a good friend of our house. Tom comes, he forgets a jacket, we will close one eye.”
posted by geoff. at 1:32 PM - 66 comments

The young Yankees fan who lost his autographs [ESPN]
posted by chavenet at 11:10 AM - 13 comments

The war continues. The illegal and criminal Russian invasion of Ukraine nears the third month of fighting. It's not going super well for them, with minimal gains in the east and significant withdrawals around Karkhiv, towards the Russian border. Ukraine counterattacks are expected to continue. The USA and many other countries continues to give billions in support and weapons. But Ukraine has suffered intensely as well, losing irreplaceable people and devestating economic blows. [more inside]
posted by Jacen at 9:49 AM - 118 comments

SLYT, ~2 min. Metal spheres swinging and bouncing off each other in increasingly inventive ways, all synchronized to music -- idk, it's just a lot of fun to watch!
posted by mpark at 8:31 AM - 24 comments

Art professor Kim Beil in Lapham's Quarterly on the advent of color photography and the complicated questions of the perception of color. Color is among the most challenging aspects of our experience to describe. Spectrophotometers and colorimeters can quantify light waves, yet their measurements have little impact on our feeling for color. As the philosopher Zeno Vendler put it, “Vincent van Gogh loved the color yellow—and certainly not because of its wavelength.” Color is infamous for its variability in language and perception. How can we know that what we are seeing is the same as what someone else sees? How can we separate what we are seeing from the thing itself? Or, as Ludwig Wittgenstein asked in his Remarks on Colour, “Where do we draw the line here between logic and experience?” In the Remarks, written the year before his death in 1951, the philosopher’s thoughts about color invariably lead back to the study of philosophy. What things are knowable? How are they known? What can be determined through philosophical reasoning? Wittgenstein reflected, “Colors are a stimulus to philosophizing.”
posted by briank at 7:32 AM - 16 comments

While I was scrolling deep in the trenches of TikTok one morning, I had a visceral reaction to a video—with what I can only describe as chaotic good energy—about a design trend called “cluttercore.” Taking off during the pandemic, the hashtag has reached 49.6 million views on TikTok (and 23,703 tags on Instagram), and spawned more videos than any of my devices can load. I honestly had a hard time looking away from my screen because I saw so much of myself within this aesthetic. From Sydney Gore in Architectural Digest. See also Vanessa Brown's piece for The Conversation and Olivia Harvey's take for Apartment Therapy.
posted by Bella Donna at 7:19 AM - 91 comments

The diminutive Wheelie is an Autobot child / But don't let your guard down; he gets pretty wild! He's often sold short and gets called hurtful things / But Wheelie won't suffer such arrows and slings!
Of all of the years he's spent fighting in space / With Sharkticon goons and the Quintesson race. Keeping things peaceful gets a bit tricky / When he hangs out with Daniel Witwicky.
This bot and that child are birds of a feather / And they tend to get into trouble together! Though reasons may differ across his depictions / Young Wheelie speaks always with curious diction.
posted by Foaf at 6:31 PM - 7 comments

For the past three years, Matt Sienkiewicz, an associate professor of communication and international studies at Boston College, and Nick Marx, an associate professor of film and media studies at Colorado State University, have immersed themselves in the world of conservative comedy. The findings of their inquiry, which they detail in their new book, That’s Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them, might come as a surprise to devotees of the Daily Show: Conservative humorists aren’t merely catching up to their liberal counterparts in terms of reach and popularity. They’ve already caught them — and, in some cases, surpassed them, even as the liberal mainstream has continued to write conservative comedy off as a contradiction in terms. [more inside]
posted by buntastic at 2:28 PM - 102 comments

Can asexuals be part of pride? Who decides? (Single link S. Bear Bergman). Queer identity may sometimes be about who we might be fucking at the moment, or have done in the past, but it is also about our politics, our place of resistance to the forces of compulsory heterosexuality and all the other pieces of the privilege puzzle that come with it. And you, who are doing the thing with vigor professionally and in your spare time, are definitely not the person I think should be quietly excusing yourself from a dry spot under the rainbow umbrella, if you will.
posted by spamandkimchi at 1:21 PM - 31 comments

A few memories and reflections on buying bagels in New York City and Döner in Berlin, language, tourists and immigrants, and expectations. "When you move to a country, you have this list of things in your head that you know will make your life easier. If I can just get my Anmeldung, if I can just learn the language, if I can just get my Unbegrenzte Aufenthaltserlaubnis, then everything will be ok. Then, I will be secure. Then, I will truly be able to call this place home. Could you imagine, years later, slowly realising that your efforts to integrate have suddenly depreciated?"
posted by brainwane at 10:42 AM - 56 comments

Tomorrow, Liverpool Football Club take on Southampton. Lose, and the possibility of the Quadruple (English Football League Cup, Football Assocation Cup, Premiership, European Champions League) in the same season is finished as Manchester City will be Premiership champions. A Liverpool draw or win, and it goes to the last day of the Premiership season, and the Champions League final (against Real Madrid, who have a track record in this tournament) on May 28th. Liverpool Football Club is managed by Jürgen Klopp. The odds continue to shorten. Plot twist: Liverpool can only win the Premiership if Manchester City fail to win their final game. Against Aston Villa (who sold Jack Grealish to them for £100,000,000). Who is managed by Steven Gerrard.
posted by Wordshore at 8:07 AM - 40 comments

More and different kinds of people can now aspire to TV’s most important job—but streaming and COVID have set them up to fail.
posted by Etrigan at 6:31 AM - 51 comments

Pop Quiz Time! Who said the following? “Freedom is power. To live a life untamed and unafraid is the gift that I've been given, and so my journey begins.” A: Wei Wuxian ☐; B: Catwoman ☐; C: This Thread ☐ [more inside]
posted by taz at 2:49 AM - 111 comments

Buried in These Hands for Years: Thomas Dolby’s ‘The Golden Age of Wireless’ Turns 40 [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:18 PM - 54 comments

Put your skills to the test and solve thirty-two Wordles at once! You have 37 guesses to solve all 32 words.
posted by geoff. at 2:43 PM - 78 comments

RAMMSTEIN - Amerika (WAY TOO AMERICAN Cover) This is what happens when it two Italian multi-instrumentalist musicians decide to cover big hits in often very unsuitable styles. [more inside]
posted by dominik at 9:24 AM - 14 comments

"The only reason it's sold is to have some alternative [to pseudoephedrine] to offer consumers, even if it's a worthless one." Pharmaceutical blogger Derek Lowe of In the Pipeline (previously) discusses phenylephrine, which does not work as a decongestant and is "indistinguishable from placebo in conditions like allergic rhinitis", saying it is "is of no real use and does not deserve its FDA listing." [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 8:12 AM - 61 comments

Imagine you receive an invitation one day from your mayor, inviting you to serve as a member of your city’s newly established permanent Citizens’ Assembly. "You will be one of 100 others like you — people who are not politicians or even necessarily party members. All of you were drawn by lot through a fair and random process called a civic lottery. ... Important decisions have been shaped by everyday people about 10-year, $5 billion strategic plans, 30-year infrastructure investment strategies, tackling online hate speech and harassment, taking preventative action against increased flood risks, improving air quality, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and many other issues."
posted by NotLost at 7:42 AM - 30 comments