December 20
Uncovering Edinburgh’s forgotten lives, one stair at a time.
"Tenement Town takes a look behind the doors I pass every day, and offers glimpses of the lives that were lived over the centuries in the places Edinburgh’s citizens still call home." - Diarmid Mogg on his new website. Each entry starts with a specific Edinburgh front door and takes us step by step through 200 years or so of the individuals who've lived there. Today's investigation covers 10 Hill Place, the latest of the 15 addresses he's tackled so far. [more inside]
Restart, restart, restart
Neon White [YouTube][Trailer] “Describing Neon White’s genre might be more difficult than actually playing it. A “speedrunning FPS-parkour-deck-builder” sounds incredibly esoteric. But that description belies a fairly simple core loop. Each level is basically an obstacle course, with both enemies and bottomless pits to overcome. Scattered throughout are “cards” that double as weapon pickups and navigational abilities. Grab a pistol card, shoot a few enemies, then use that card’s ability for an extra jump over a bottomless pit. Simple. Throughout its 90-plus levels, Neon White does steadily increase the complexity: The obstacle courses incorporate tripwires, bounce pads, walls that can only be broken with certain weapons, and more. The difficulty (and fun) comes from stringing together these actions, like a gymnast running along a balance beam before dismounting directly onto a set of parallel bars.” [via: Polygon] BONUS: [35 Minute Speedrun (World Record)][YouTube] [more inside]
Merry Christmas, Mr. Sakamoto
Ryuichi Sakamoto releases "last" concert amid cancer battle (Kyodo News). Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence / Ryuichi Sakamoto - From Ryuichi Sakamoto: Playing the Piano 2022 [more inside]
How it looks like trying to buy printer ink in 8 cities
This is what a tech market looks like in:-- Rest of The World's correspondents share their photo essays from: Taipei, Jakarta, Sao Paolo, Lagos, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Bengaluru, and Mexico City.
Auslan Holiday
Auslan, the majority Australian sign language has a visual dictionary with three recognised signs for ‘holiday’, of which the second is noteworthy.
Covid Disrupts Your Immune System
Immunological dysfunction persists for 8 months following initial mild-to-moderate SARS-CoV-2 infection Would you change your behavior if you knew that COVID causes immunodeficiency that mirrors AIDS? Merck manual now lists COVID alongside AIDS as a cause of acquired Lymphocytopenia. “Patients with COVID-19 also frequently have lymphocytopenia (35 to 83% of patients).“ Recent papers show that SARS-CoV-2 infects the immune system, causes T cell exhaustion, B cell disregulation, immunosenescence, and is a lympho-manipulative pathogen. [more inside]
Beautiful Boards of Wargaming
Wargames blog The Player's Aid has started a bi-weekly column on map-making and map design for tabletop war games. It provides a look into a very particular niche in graphical design. Examples of two different approaches shown are the lush area-based map of Britain in This War Without an Enemy about the English Civil War and the more subdued but very clear hex-based map in Holland '44 about Operation Market Garden, but there are up to now a total of five games featured.
December 19
“Doo-doot-doot-doot-doo…I know this! How do I know this?”
Aspiring singer-songwriter (CAZZA) and YouTuber Call Me Caroline does a first listen + musical analysis of The Beatles' Rubber Soul [more inside]
Now You Know This is the End
'One of the most brilliant singers, songwriters and lyricists this country has ever produced' "Terry Hall of The Specials has died aged 63. The Two Tone and Ska pioneers from Coventry confirmed the sad news on social media on Monday night.
A statement from the band read: "It is with great sadness that we announce the passing, following a brief illness, of Terry, our beautiful friend, brother and one of the most brilliant singers, songwriters and lyricists this country has ever produced." --Coventry Telegraph [more inside]
Explicitly Acknowledging All the Other Possible Routes, the Unread Books
Yet even as a “mode,” literature’s circulations still move well beyond any single reader’s reach. Any individual scholar is constrained by context and limited by their languages, and so overwhelmed by world literature writ large. In an essay a decade later, [David] Damrosch revisited the issues of scale and position: “At once exhilarating and unsettling, the range and variety of literatures now in view raise serious questions about scale, of translation and comprehension, and of persisting imbalances of economic and cultural power.” from World Literature Comes Full Circle, 1522–2022 by Kevin Riordan
(Comic Sans) That Boy Needs Therapy (/Comic Sans)
The Lavender Scare and James Web
The NYT today shone additional light on the allegations of homophobia that have been common since the naming of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), including here on Metafilter. In particular, they point to the research done by Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi, president of the National Society of Black Physicists, who suggests that anti-gay witch-hunts in the US State Department that have been blamed on Webb, were in fact perpetrated by John Peurifoy. However, they story does not end there. [more inside]
Long Division
The Persistence of Race Science: Science built up the idea of race. Can it ever be torn down? A well-written and deep investigative series from UnDark Magazine. Their navigation is a little awkward and breaks the back-button, so links to each of the articles in the series are after the jump. [more inside]
What the January 6 committee’s criminal referral means for Trump.
The House January 6 committee voted on Monday to recommend that the Justice Department pursue criminal charges against former President Donald Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election that culminated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. [more inside]
103 covers, 62 designers, 54 imprints
"These are futures where we might turn from despair."
How to Survive in Broken Worlds (Jesmyn Ward on Octavia Butler)
"Epic put children and teens at risk"
"Epic used privacy-invasive default settings and deceptive interfaces that tricked Fortnite users, including teenagers and children.... these enforcement actions make clear to businesses that the FTC is cracking down on these unlawful practices." Fortnite Video Game Maker Epic Games to Pay More Than Half a Billion Dollars over FTC Allegations of Privacy Violations and Unwanted Charges
Grieving California and the World
It’s “really important to know that climate distress is not a pathology.” Solastalgia, Albrecht wrote, “is not about looking back to some golden past, nor is it about seeking another place as ‘home.’ It is the ‘lived experience’ of the loss of the present as manifest in a feeling of dislocation; [more inside]
"I can’t tell you what a relief it was to find this place!"
Two short speculative stories, written by people of color, that use a fantastically cozy teashop and restaurant to depict comfort and care. "Speaking of the service! They’re LGBTQ+ and undead-friendly, obviously, so that’s a plus." "Review for: Izakaya Tanuki" by J. L. Akagi praises a hard-to-find ozoni vendor. "Who’s that interesting hominid you were talking to?" In "Liz's Tea House" by Rodrigo Culagovski (MetaFilter's Own signal), space newbie Ana stumbles through a lot of beloved scifi stories on the way to making a home for herself. [more inside]
Exploring Jim Morrison's poetry notebooks
Jim Morrison wanted to be a poet. Instead, he became a rock star. Here are his poetry notebooks Jim left behind over two dozen notebooks, even though he died at 27 and destroyed his high-school notes. He gave them titles like “Tape Noon,” “GOLD,” “Paris Journal,” and “Lizard Celebration.”
Who is George Santos?
New congressmember-elect (R-NY, Long Island) George Santos's resume seems to be fictional (NYTimes) [more inside]
MSG > computer chip insulation > profit!
The Dark Is Rising
Beginning Dec 20, the BBC is broadcasting daily episodes of a radio dramatization of Susan Cooper's classic children's fantasy novel The Dark Is Rising, with each episode corresponding (more or less) to a day in the story, moving from Midwinter's Eve to the Wild Hunt. [more inside]
Spinoza? I hardly knows her!
Oh hey, it turns out it's Monday again. Ah well, it happens. I guess today we might as well ask (I mean we could not ask, but nah): When people talk about "Free Will" what do they mean? a) Wheaton, b) Shakespeare, c) Meghan Markel's brother in law, d) this thread, OR ... [more inside]
December 18
A really good musical
Extremely talented singer/songwriter and performer Todrick Hall has written, directed, choreographed, produced and performed in a 1 hour 31 minute long musical film, Forbidden, full of great songs, great choreography, great costumes and great sets which is FREE to watch on his youtube site. The supporting cast includes Cynthia Erivo, Tiffany Haddish, Jade Novah, and RuPaul. [more inside]
Soñé una vida para mí
Les Mis in French.
Les Mis in Japanese.
Les Mis in Dutch.
Les Mis in Portuguese.
Les Mis in Norweigen (incomplete).
Les Mis in Korean.
Les Mis in Spanish.
[With varying production quality.]
Caligula, ancient tattoos and war elephants.
toldinstone is a podcast by Historian Garrett Ryan who discusses the ancient world. His latest episode is 'Trivia, Ancient and Modern' with Ken Jennings of Jeopardy fame.
storytelling by anthropologists and other careful observers
Otherwise Magazine's current issue on Work includes a profile of a teacher in Kurdistan and a visual report "Delivering precarity" on food delivery work in Romania. The issue on Becoming includes an ode to tap water and stories from those detained in refugee camps.
Two Pakistani men used to talk and sing from the small windows at night. I liked listening to them. It made me feel calm. One of them had a little mirror so that they could see each other and he used to joke: "Let's do a video call, uncle."[more inside]
Perpetual Broths
"Taking stock of the world’s oldest soups:" at Atlas Obscura, Blair Mastbaum writes of diligently maintained soup and stew bases kept boiling for many years, including those used for the neua tune (a type of beef stew) at Wattana Panich in Bangkok and the oden broth at Otafuku in Tokyo. On a related note, a Reddit commenter discusses claims of centuries-old pot-au-feu stocks in France.
Faces, Places
The 2022 NYT face quiz is here! Can you recognize these 52 famous faces?
The Divided Dial
From the On The Media team comes The Divided Dial, a 5 part podcast series about talk radio: its origins, its main players, and why one side of the political spectrum came to dominate so much of the radio spectrum. Episodes run between 30 and 50 minutes.
Fighting Fantasy.
Ranking Every Mainline Final Fantasy Game [Game Informer] “Final Fantasy is a staple in JRPGs and video games as a whole. It might have more entries in it than any other series out there and it won’t be slowing down anytime soon. On top of that, thanks to its anthology-like nature, if one Final Fantasy game doesn’t click for you, there’s a good chance another one will. As a result, ranking the Final Fantasy series can be highly contentious. Everyone has a lot of love for the first entry they played, and then there are heavy hitters like Final Fantasy X and VII, too. However, the staff here at Game Informer did the seemingly impossible: we ranked all 19 mainline numbered Final Fantasy games, including their direct sequels, from worst to best.” [more inside]
The tiny Paris pastel shop that changed art history
"The Maison du Pastel shop, off rue Rambuteau, opens only on Thursday afternoons. In this small window of time, Isabelle and Margaret serve their customers like they are selling elixirs for the soul. They spend the rest of the week at their atelier in a village 60km outside Paris, where they live in a dilapidated house previously owned by Isabelle’s ancestors. There they make 1,800 shades by hand, using a method passed down from Henri Roché Sr, which has changed little since the 18th century." 'The tiny Paris pastel shop that changed art history,' (archive.ph here). (Stolen from today's Chartbook, I should confess!)
December 17
Satire from Australian group The Shovel
A Totally Normal Interview with Author Emily St. John Mandel
Exactly what it says on the tin. A brief, but informative interview with the author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility, in Slate, about what she's been up to this year. [more inside]
Now that's what I call flying
Raven rides the slipstream "bow wave" of a truck[SLYT] for kilometres down the Dempster Highway.
Putin's War (SLNYT)
Putin's War A Times investigation based on interviews, intercepts, documents and secret battle plans shows how a “walk in the park” became a catastrophe for Russia. [more inside]
Why fusion will never happen
Why fusion will never happen Not because it can’t, because it won’t. Because no matter how hard you try, it’s always going to cost more than the solutions we already have.
Instead of soccer - the rest is history
For the last couple of years, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, British historians, writers and broadcasters, have run a chatty and informative two-hander podcast The Rest is History: or wherever you get your podcasts . They are nearly 300 episodes (each 25-50 mins) in: "interrogating the past, and attempting to de-tangle the present".
As Qatar approached, they agreed to have a conversation about each of the 32 finalists. Their choices are idiosyncratic: Ecuador gets a chunk on the Galapagos and Darwin's Finches. For non-scientists they make quite a good fist of explaining the story and its importance. Denmark: The Great Escape . . . of 99% of Danish Jews in 1943. [more inside]
Good-bye P-22 - LA's mountain lion compassionately euthanized
P-22 was a mountain lion who unknowingly changed the world. A eulogy for P-22, who was discovered to have a number of health ailments, the most serious being that he appears to have been hit by a car. He was an integral part of the LA landscape, and brought attention to environmental factors that are hostile to wildlife and animal life in an expanding urban landscape. P-22 was the inspiration behind the funding drive for the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, the first bridge "in the California highway system designed specifically for fostering wildlife connectivity".
Meow-zzo Soprano
(SL Twitter) A young opera singer's practice is interrupted by the Phanom Of The Ope... [more inside]
On the Internet, No One Knows Derek is a Dog
The most popular people names for dogs [unleashed] & The Pet-Name Trend Humans Can’t Resist [runs free]
[ RIFFUSION ] (noun): riff + diffusion
Stable Diffusion can generate images from text. Spectrograms are graphical representations of audio. Riffusion mixes the two. rock and roll electric guitar solo, lo-fi hiphop beats, the sound of metafilter
Young farmers argued with elders about which song to play at the protest
Punjab: Food, Music and Resistance from Vittles Magazine newsletter (previously).
‘Pecha’ and the music of protest.
Mirchan Kurkurian and Swollen Lips.
The Prophet of Vegetables.
Samosas and Mimosas: Authenticity and Feminism in Hot Mango Chutney Sauce.
‘Pecha’ and the music of protest.
Mirchan Kurkurian and Swollen Lips.
The Prophet of Vegetables.
Samosas and Mimosas: Authenticity and Feminism in Hot Mango Chutney Sauce.
December 16
Practical Utopias from Degrowth Pastoralism to Star Trek Futurism
Why the Age of American Progress Ended [ungated] - "Invention alone can't change the world; what matters is what happens next."[1,2,3,4] [more inside]
"Hoo-Ah," Said the Bartender, "Say Hello to My Little Ice Cubes"
Let's say you know you routinely see this certain trope in films or television. However, you have absolutely no idea how to even begin navigating TVTropes to find the name for it. TVTropes has your back: the Trope Finder forum, where community members will help you with their collective knowledge to find the trope you're describing. [more inside]
Santa, When the Walls Fell
You better watch out: once again, (MeFite!) John C. Worsley brings us holiday cheer from space, the final frontier. Previously. Previously. The whole collection (all of which I love).
"I’m tired of losing outlets to conglomeration."
Bookforum magazine (previously (an incomplete list)), launched in 1994, recently announced that the current issue would be the last. An appreciation.
“I'd like to take you now, on wings of song as it were…”
Last month Tom Lehrer put all his songs online for free streaming or downloading, and relinquished all rights to them. You can browse them by album, title or category, and also download the sheet music for each song. But get those songs fast, because the website is only staying up for a limited time yet.
I don't knit; I'm just a fan.
The coziest frogs (and tiny chickens, ducks, fawns, rabbits, kitties, etc.) you'll find anywhere. Claire Garland (dot pebbles) creates incredibly detailed and adorable knitting patterns for tiny animals and also their tiny sweaters. She graciously gave me permission to use a really lovely frog photo (the one with the tiny table) for my holiday cards, and then I discovered so much more. She also has a beautiful book, with those patterns also on Ravelry. Instagram too.