January 21
If you could say one thing to everyone in the world, what would it be?
"Aren't you worried that you're gonna miss out on certain important life experiences from being homeschooled?" "Umm, that did cross my mind, but you know, VR is a way to escape, you know? Like, like, like I can be a frog... You know, I can make friends in VR, and they might treat me a bit differently based on my voice, but they won't treat me differently based on my height, or based on the way I look. It's really, I'd say, I think it's the closest form of anonymity that isn't anonymous you could get." Dawabvle talks to Syrmor in VRchat about living with ADHD, bullying in school, and Kermit the Frog. [more inside]
travel writing from a “radically different” American slave
David Dorr, who in 1853 became the first African American to visit the Holy Land, couldn’t pass up the trip – he was a slave, forced to travel with his owner Cornelius Fellowes. Dorr later wrote about his three-year journey through Europe and the Middle East in a unique travel book, A Colored Man Round the World, which provided white readers with a rare look, before the Civil War, at an educated Black perspective. Slaves back then were erased from history, but Dorr, turning the tables, wrote as if he was traveling alone, and barely mentioned Fellowes except to mock him as clumsy or awkward. [more inside]
January 20
disorderly and disruptive and not amenable to discipline or control
"I do not hate my body, because such a thing would be pointless, shortsighted. You cannot hate an animal for what she is, especially one who bears your ungrateful mind through this terrible world. And anyway, how do you hate something who marks her territory so dramatically, with such violence and panache? Who reminds you, with each step, I am here, I am here, I am here?"
Carmen Maria Machado on her unruly body. [more inside]
When the children seized power, we agreed… MORE BATS!
US-based socialist magazine Jacobin's recent Childhood issue featured a novel insert: Jacobin's first children's book, More Bats, written by Jacob Kramer and illustrated by Malina Omut. Kramer says, "More Bats is a playful reimagining of what might happen if our society prioritized maximizing bat populations, instead of our current model, which allocates most resources to the military industrial complex." He has since collaborated with illustrator K-Fai Steele on Noodlephant, a kids' book about elephants, kangaroos, rebellion, power, and community action. Book trailer here.
Untreated chronic pain is a human rights issue
The clampdown on opioid prescriptions is hurting pain patients. "A report released last month by Human Rights Watch paints a cautionary and at times harrowing picture of what pain patients are experiencing today. Because of well-intended efforts to address the overdose crisis, many doctors are severely limiting opioid prescriptions. Patients who rely on opioid analgesics are being forcibly weaned off the medication or seeing their prescriptions significantly reduced. Other patients are unable to find doctors willing to treat them at all." [more inside]
Music For Activities Freaks
You may know True Stories as a 1986 movie by Talking Heads with an accompanying album. What isn't widely known is there is a second album, released on vinyl and cassette only -- Sounds From True Stories: Music For Activities Freaks, a score album from the movie [41m]. It's worth a listen! Side A: Cocktail Desperado (Terry Allen And The Panhandle Mystery Band), Road Song (Meredith Monk), Freeway Son (David Byrne), Brownie's Theme (David Byrne), Mall Muzak: Building A Highway / Puppy Polka / Party Girls (Carl Finch), Dinner Music (Kronos Quartet) [more inside]
⤪ ⤨ ⤧ ⤩ ⤭ ⤮ ⤯ ⤰ ⤱ ⤲
Crash II: Miss Daisy drives YOU
With a win at the PGA Green Book is now the lead contender for 2019's Academy Award for Best Picture. Oh dear.
Storytime
The Fable Cottage - classic fairytales retold in modern English, French, Spanish, Italian and German, with native-speaker audio and other nice features for language learners. [more inside]
The product was so good, it sold itself and went global.
"The Plot Against George Soros." Hannes Grassegger (Twitter) describes how two American political consultants launched an anti-Soros campaign, and how it then went viral. (SLBuzzfeed; originally appeared in German and with some differences)
Darn good yarn
Cloughmills Crochet Club has been astounded by the attention their wool creation has attracted. Members of the close knit County Antrim group have been interviewed by national and local media and now their story has reached American online magazine, Atlas Obscura, based in New York. [more inside]
Láadan
This Science Fiction Novelist Created a Feminist Language from Scratch - "Can a language be designed specifically to express the thoughts and feelings of women? In 1984, the linguist Suzette Haden Elgin wrote a science fiction novel to test this question. The result was Native Tongue, a dystopian tale of a future America that has been widely compared to The Handmaid's Tale. It was a pioneering feminist experiment, sold as a paperback original with a big green alien on the cover." (via; previously)
Once we searched Google, but now Google searches us.
Shoshana Zuboff has a new book published which welcomes us to the age of surveillance capitalism. (LA Times)
The Guardian's tech editor John Naughton has a 10 question and answer session with her.
Once we thought of digital services as free, but now surveillance capitalists think of us as free.
The Guardian's tech editor John Naughton has a 10 question and answer session with her.
Once we thought of digital services as free, but now surveillance capitalists think of us as free.
marvel at the underduck region
if you only look at one picture of a duck today, let it be this one [twitter] [threadreader] [more inside]
Why wouldn’t the giant robot in pads be there?
“I remember one day, my son, who was 7 or 8, had drawn me a picture of a hybrid robotic football-player-slash-cowboy. He was really sold: ‘You should do this! It would be so cool!’" The secret history of Cleatus, Fox Sports’s bizarre football robot.
wet noises intensify
January 19
Creating While Clean; 9 sober musicians
In the modern pop-culture tradition, being a musician has often come with a series of default lifestyle expectations, ones of indulgence and recklessness, larger-than-life living, and a diligent pursuit of altered forms of consciousness. Some see these expectations as having played a part in what happened to them, though most ultimately see their decisions and actions as also—if not mainly—a matter of their own psychology and personality and predisposition...What they have in common is that they are all, by their own account, for now, living sober. [more inside]
Grand!
What if the Grand Canyon were inverted?
Walter Chandoha’s cat models […] must be alert, graceful and beautiful
In the internet age, we are all cat photographers. One study found that in Britain alone, more than 3.8 million photos and clips of cats are shared each day — twice the number of selfies shared (we love our cats more than we love ourselves) and more than twice the number of dog photos shared. Once upon a time, though, there was but One Cat Photographer to Rule Them All. His name was Walter Chandoha. (Hyperallergic)
By the time he died, on Jan. 11, Mr. Chandoha had taken some 90,000 cat photos, nearly all before cats had become viral darlings of social media. He was 98. (NYTimes) (Non-Times link, leaves out some adorable pics) [more inside]
By the time he died, on Jan. 11, Mr. Chandoha had taken some 90,000 cat photos, nearly all before cats had become viral darlings of social media. He was 98. (NYTimes) (Non-Times link, leaves out some adorable pics) [more inside]
Guitarist Phil Dürr, 1965-2019
Phil Dürr, best known as the guitarist for '90s Detroit funk/riff rock band Big Chief and later for blues singer Thornetta Davis, died at 53 on January 11th. This obituary sums up his life and work in loving detail. [more inside]
All Roads Lead to the Dog House
Few agree when precisely "old Seattle" died, but wherever you place the period, The Dog House was in many ways emblematic of the old days. It stood for 60 years as a working-class gathering space, offering cheap food and beer in its smoke-filled booths, and camaraderie in nightly singalongs around the organ. Knute Berger recalls how The Dog House "challenged the myth of Seattle nice." Jean Godden and J.A. Jance reminisced during the Dog House's final months in 1993, and Dog House regular Floyd Waterson remembers its last day in 1994. But the soul of the place was really in its people: longtime owner Laurie Gulbransen was remembered in an obituary in 2000; organist Dick Dickerson died in 2006. The corner of 7th & Bell hosted a 24-hour restaurant for nearly a century, with the Dog House's tenure bookended by the Bohemian Continental before it and the Hurricane Cafe after. The Hurricane closed at the end of 2014 and that old building was razed. The site is now known as Amazon Block 21.
DONKEY KONG 64 CHARITY NIGHTMARE For MERMAIDS
After Mermaids, a UK charity that provides services to young transgender and gender variant people and their families was awarded a £500,000 grant from the Big Lottery Fund, some people complained and the Fund delayed the grant to review the charity. Now a UK gamer and YouTuber is playing through the entire game Donkey Kong 64 on Twitch to raise money for the charity. [more inside]
Beans Have a Soul
I believe our best chance at preserving the integrity and dignity of our tradition is to return to our Pythagorean roots. We should become a cult.
SLMcSweeneys
SLMcSweeneys
"You won't have to worry about feeling desolate when autumn comes"
Hiroaki Sato (LitHub, 11/5/2018), "Haiku: The Evolution of a Strict Poetic Game": "In simplest terms, haikai meant rejection of poetic diction and adoption of language in daily use. Orthodox court poetry did not tolerate references to quotidian, down-to-earth things like shiru, 'soup,' and namasu, 'fish salad,' so incorporating daily elements was haikai. As Bashō himself explained, harusame no yanagi, 'willow in spring rain,' represented the world of court poetry, but tanishi toru karasu, 'a crow picking pond snails,' was haikai, according to Bashō's disciple Hattori Tohō." [more inside]
Einhundert jahre bauhaus
March 2019 will mark 100 years since the founding of The Bauhaus. Centenary festivities include the opening of the Bauhaus Museum Dessau in September of this year, and a tour by the Bauhaus bus,
modelled on Walter Gropius' historic Bauhaus building. The tour began in Dessau at the beginning of January, and the bus will travel to Berlin, Kinshasa, and Hong Kong. [more inside]
#RIPMachinima
Entire Machinima YouTube Channel Set To Private [Kotaku] “With no public announcement or advanced warning to many creators, the entire Machinima Youtube channel was effectively wiped from the internet recently. All videos on the channel are now private, making them unable to view. [...] News of the videos began to spread yesterday, but it’s unclear when the switch to private happened. Many creators seemed not to have been aware that their videos would be set to private. “Otter Media really just went and deleted Machinima, Happy Hour, Respawn, Realm, Prime, Inside Gaming, ETC, everything.” Jeremy Azevedo, a former creator and employee of Machinima tweeted after learning about the news. Other former creators were shocked to find years of videos now gone.” [more inside]
A brief history of secular mindfulness meditation in the West
Deconstructing Mindfulness: Embracing a Complex Simplicity. "There’s been a marked increase in studies of mindfulness and meditation in recent years. I’m worried that many of today’s researchers may think they know what they’re doing. ... [I]t makes all the sense in the world that we deconstruct mindfulness, by which I mean that we understand it to have a history, a 'side view.' It’s not a given or an absolute. It comes from somewhere. Mindfulness has been constructed." [more inside]
Just me and my dog and an impossible view
In 2018, three up and coming singer-songwriters, Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus joined forces to form the supergroup boygenius. Last summer, they recorded a six song EP with a cover evoking a certain other supergroup. In November, Pitchfork filmed a thrilling set of theirs performing at Brooklyn Steel. [more inside]
January 18
Civilisation (1969) and Civilisations (2015), British views of the past
In 1966, David Attenborough, the controller of the recently launched BBC2, asked historian Kenneth Clark to host a show, which would become Civilisation (Wikipedia), which inspired audiences in the UK and US to go to head to art museums after each of the 13 episodes originally aired, in 1969 and 1970, respectively, as noted in The Seductive Enthusiasm of Kenneth Clark’s “Civilisation” by Morgan Meis for the New Yorker. Almost 50 years later, BBC returned to the theme, now titled Civilisations (Wikipedia), with three presenters, Mary Beard, David Olusoga and Simon Schama, who looked beyond the Great Men of Europe (BBC). And it's all online ... [more inside]
Tea by sea. Cha by land.
History of the word for 茶 (tea). Silk road land based trade led to the spread of 'cha' based words, but 'te' based words come from the sea based trade.
An alarming, nearly floor-to-ceiling jumble of crumpled papers
The Grolier Club, the nation’s oldest society of bibliophiles, just celebrated the centennial of its grand Manhattan home. Yes, there’s a secret staircase hidden in a bookshelf. No, do not use gloves in its library.
Hi, my name is Bill, and I’m a recovering normie.
In which the Boozy Barrister / Boozy Badger (previously) and his online presence lured a hooman into attending a furry convention, and he delivers his subsequent report: How I Realized that Furries are Better than Me (…and just how low of a bar that was) [more inside]
Our team is red hot, your team ain't doodley squat!
Most right-thinking people agree that dogs are better than cats. Some people—those who have been infected with toxoplasmosis, probably—believe cats are better than dogs. Regardless, they can be taught to get along (the animals, that is).
Flash Point
The abysmal failure known as the Fyre Festival (previously) is the stuff of legends. This week, Netflix and Hulu rolled out competing documentaries covering the fiasco. Now, both documentary teams are accusing one another of ethical lapses, while the festival's incarcerated founder and the social media agencies who hyped the festival are profiting off of the films. The Ringer has the story.
the brittleness of children and the egos of driven men
In the fall of 1938, Wendell Johnson recruited one of his clinical psychology graduate students, 22-year-old Mary Tudor, who was avid but timorous, to undertake exactly that experiment. She was to study whether telling nonstuttering children that they stuttered would make it so. Could she talk children into a speech defect? The university had an ongoing research relationship with an orphanage in Davenport, Iowa, so Johnson suggested she base her study there. And thus, on Jan. 17, 1939, Mary Tudor drove along the high, swooping bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River to the Soldiers and Sailors Orphans' Home. The study she began that morning became the subject of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the State of Iowa and the University of Iowa.
Super Blood Wolf Moon 2019
No, it's not that T-shirt. It's actually a total lunar eclipse and "super moon." NASA: Viewers in North and South America, as well as those in western parts of Europe and Africa, will be able to watch one of the sky's most dazzling shows on Jan. 20, 2019, when the Sun, Earth and Moon align at 9:12 p.m. PST (12:12 a.m. EST), creating a total lunar eclipse. The full moon will also be at its closest point to Earth in its orbit, called perigee. [more inside]
Burn Brian 2019
Burn Brian 2019: the "Queen of Shitty Robots" shares some unfortunate news (SLYT) (previously). "I don't want to be a brain tumor girl -- like, I don't want this to be my thing. I want to be badass builder girl who can build whatever she wants and does random projects and goes to space and is allowed to do headstands." [more inside]
To Save the Sound of a Stradivarius, a Whole City Must Keep Quiet
To Save the Sound of a Stradivarius, a Whole City Must Keep Quiet Make sure to read it to the end. I love it when technology is used to preserve art.
Big Mac's a Big Mac, but they call it Le Big Mac
"In a landmark decision by the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), McDonald's lost the right to the trademark "Big Mac" across Europe to the Ireland-based, fast-food chain Supermac." [more inside]
“She decides to leave for Europe, with hopes of a better life.”
Bury Me, My Love [YouTube][Game Trailer] “A powerful interactive tale of one woman’s migration from Syria to France. The game takes place via a WhatsApp-style cellphone conversation between Nour and her anxious husband, Majd, who remains in war-torn Homs, caring for elderly relatives. I play as Majd, responding to my wife’s text messages, offering support and advice through a series of dialogue choices. Nour is a middle-class professional who works in the medical field. She wants to escape the war that has destroyed her life and the lives of everyone she knows. Nour’s journey takes her through many countries, across stiffly guarded borders as well as perilous mountains and seas. She falls in with a variety of fellow refugees and migrants. Some aid her. Others seek her help. Others exploit her.” [Play the Game's Prologue for Free Here] [more inside]
Unendowed with wealth or pity
@girlziplocked asks, "What's a dirty secret that everybody in your industry knows about but anyone outside of your line of work would be scandalized to hear?" Twitter responds with dozens of reports of systemic fraud, abuse, prejudice, corruption, incompetence, and precarity from restaurants, heavy industry, non-profits, technology, theatre, shipping, customer service, flower arranging, medicine, law, art, education, government, senior care, agriculture, telecommunications, and virtually every other sphere of modern economic activity. [more inside]
Do unto otters...
Pete (the otter) and Shu-Shu (the Scottie) - in which a Scottie dog convinces an injured otter to try swimming. [Lots of photos and circa 2009 web design]
‘Our country is in a hellhole right now’—Cardi B
As the partial US government shutdown winds up its fourth week, we learned that President Trump directed his attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about his Moscow Tower Project (BuzzFeed), a bombshell development immediately condemned by Democrats (Politico) as obstruction of justice if not an impeachable offense (Lawfare). House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler both pledged to investigate (AP). Attorney General nominee Bill Barr, writing to DAG Rod Rosenstein last June about "Muller's 'Obstruction' Theory", also declared, "[I]f a President […] suborns perjury[…], then he, like anyone else, commits the crime of obstruction." In other Cohen news, the Wall Street Journal revealed he hired an IT Firm to rig early CNBC, Drudge Polls to favor Trump, subsequently stiffing the firm and Trump (allegedly). Cohen still intends to testify before before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on on February 7th, despite concerns for his family (CNN) after Trump's repeated hostile public remarks. [more inside]
“purpose paradigm”
“However, the truth is that there is no convincing evidence at all of this supposed success. A fast-growing body of reports, analyses, and research, including reports from Amnesty International, shows how self-regulating business initiatives, including the palm-oil certification scheme of Unilever, make no real impact or worse, inhibit real change with a false illusion of progress. “One of the systemic problems that Unilever’s ‘sustainable’ palm-oil scheme refuses to acknowledge,” says Eric Gottwald from the International Labor Rights Forum, “is that workers on plantations need independent trade unions to improve their working conditions, not corporate-sponsored “certifiers.” A six-month long investigation into Unilever’s supply chain in 2017 by five millennial journalists from Investico, a Dutch platform for investigative journalism, did not find evidence to back up Unilever’s leadership claims either. At the five certified palm-oil plantations that they visited in Indonesia, as part of the investigation, the team encountered the same environmental and labor violations that are known to be pervasive among non-certified plantations.” Big Business Has a New Scam: The ‘Purpose Paradigm’ Multinational corporations are luring millennial workers with empty promises and self-serving slogans. (The Nation)
That's "one hundred ten", not "six"
Donald Knuth Lectures - a playlist of 110 lectures (most of them about an hour long) on TeX, mathematical writing, algorithms, data structures, hardware, cryptography...
Hundreds of thousands of women who aren't driving about it
Women's March AND March for Life Reproductive rights are an often contentious flash point in American politics, and this weekend, in the midst of a the Trump shutdown (current Omnigate catch-all thread on mefi), that flash point will be in Washington, as both the March for Life and the Women's March make their way to the National Mall. The Women's March started in 2017 as a global protest for recognition of women's issues upon the election of Donald Trump, and at 500,000-1,000,000 participants was supposedly the largest march on Washington since the Vietnam War protests, and made pussy hats a thing (although in 2018 they were less of a thing), while the March for Life, though smaller at tens of thousands, is both much older, starting in 1972, and used to draw much bigger crowds, and also tends to be a bit more religiony. Wherever you stand on the issue, this is the weekend they're marching about it in Washington. [more inside]
Puputov Cocktails and Other Shitty Weapons
(SL Vice) People have definitely tried to kill each other with shit. What follows is an (almost certainly incomplete) chronological history of poo as a weapon. [more inside]
January 17
A family of drunken tourists has been terrorizing New Zealand
For weeks, a terrible family of unruly tourists has wrought a trail of destruction from Auckland all the way to Hamilton. A large man in red shorts and a white tank top, a woman in a unicorn onesie, and a small, angry boy are the unwilling public faces of this terrible family who number about 12, according to multiple witnesses. [more inside]
With ingestible pill, you can track fart development in real time
Scientists often hope to break ground with their research. But a group of Australian researchers would likely be happy with breaking wind. The team developed an ingestible electronic capsule to monitor gas levels in the human gut. When it’s paired with a pocket-sized receiver and a mobile phone app, the pill reports tail-wind conditions in real time as it passes from the stomach to the colon. [more inside]
Technological Tristesse
Sad by design. "While classical melancholy was defined by isolation and introspection, today’s tristesse plays out amidst busy social media interactions. Geert Lovink on ‘technological sadness’ – the default mental state of the online billions."