November 12
A line
Rhythmical Lines "When he was eighty-five, Wacław Szpakowski wrote a treatise for a lifetime project that no one had known about. Titled “Rhythmical Lines,” it describes a series of labyrinthine geometrical abstractions, each one produced from a single continuous line." [via]
gotta get that good dumpling!
8th dose of Female Fronted Metal 🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘
Don't know about you, but I had a pretty rough week so I'm indulging myself with Jinjer and Spiritbox, starting with one of the greatest collabs of the current millenium: Spiritbox - Circle With Me ft. Tatiana Shmayluk of Jinjer [more inside]
Mood
My-co-lor-ology
The Mushroom Color Atlas is a resource and reference for everyone curious about mushrooms and the beautiful and subtle colors derived from dyeing with mushrooms. But it is also the start of a journey and a point of departure, introducing you to the kaleidoscopic fungi kingdom and our connection to it. My hope is that through this Atlas everyone will be inspired to learn more about the mycological world, and begin to understand the importance of the networks, connections and symbiotic relationships that live in our forests. Most importantly, understanding our impact on these delicate networks and our role as stewards of the land, bringing positive change to our local environments and our planet. [via The Morning News]
"Never take your accounts department for granted ever again"
Aftermath, the tech and gaming blog founded by webugees from Kotaku, is one year old! In a lengthy post on their site, founders Luke Plunkett, Gita Jackson, Riley McLeod, Nathan Grayson and Chris Person discuss what running their little co-op business is like, and the issues they face in keeping it afloat.
I went away just when you needed me so
"Everlasting Love" is one of two songs to become a Billboard Hot 100 top 40 hit in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s* and the only song to become a UK top 40 hit in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. [more inside]
This morning for no obvious reason, I remembered the Fuel Rats.
"I find it reassuring that in a game that is in some ways a libertarian power fantasy (you and your spaceship, go anywhere do whatever you want), and a PvP universe, one of the first things people did was create a volunteer ambulance service."
Over on Mastodon, Dave Anderson walks us through the story of the Fuel Rats, the emergency refueling service of Elite:Dangerous.
For when everything isn't awesome
Mobile Crisis Construction is an Australian initiative to turn rubble back into homes, schools and hospitals in war-torn or disaster-hit countries like Ukraine. Its Lego-like MCC Crisis Blocks "employ simple technology that works with standard brick coursing height and length, and can be laid with unskilled labour due to their interlocking design". They need no mortar and are produced on site with a mobile factory housed in a shipping container, each of which can produce enough bricks for 5-10 homes in a week. The Perth-based charity has been funded by the local Ukrainian community.
Elon Musk's Perfect Disinformation Machine
Hidden changes are warping the already broken ecosystem that determines how many citizens—particularly in America—construct their sense of reality. (slSubstack) [more inside]
"no skips, no shortcuts"
"In his best run, Jammy had become the richest person in the world in eleven years, three months, eleven days, and twenty-three hours (in-game timer)..." "Any Percent" by Andrew Dana Hudson asks: "Imagine you could play a video game that let you live a whole human life in a matter of minutes. What would it mean to 'win' in that game? What would it mean to speedrun?" in an ultimately hopeful "proletarian-themed" science fiction story deliberately published on May Day, 2023 to celebrate International Workers' Day. I pair it with Grace Petrie's energetic song "Fixer Upper" which starts "I woke up from an awful dream / in June of 2016" yet finds a way to lead to "everything you dream is possible / it's waiting to be made .... come grab a spade!" [more inside]
Spies, bikes and smuggled ink: Fighting pollution and the Stasi
...in the Shadow of the Berlin Wall. [BBC] "Named 'Operation Trap', the Stasi's attempted to crush a group fighting for a cleaner environment – and for the right to speak out. The secret police's tactics ranged from interrogations and jail to bizarre mind games. In one incident, informants who managed to infiltrate the environmental movement covertly took coffee from a shared pantry without putting money into the coffee kitty. That plan did not work out. On the contrary: Operation Trap became one of the very rare cases in history in which the Stasi was forced to back down."
An observer that comes much closer to the original friend
Of course, it’s possible that an AI’s thoughts could never stand in for observations made by a human, in which case Wigner’s paradox will continue to haunt us. But if we agree that such an AI could be built, then detailing how such an experiment could be run helps to reveal something fundamental about the universe. It clarifies how we can determine who or what really counts as an observer and whether an observation collapses a superposition. It might even suggest that outcomes of measurements are relative to individual observers—and that there’s no absolute fact of the matter about the world we live in. from Can AI Save Schrödinger’s Cat? [Scientific American]
November 11
Why this couple built their house out of hemp
"It seemed too good to be true": Why this couple built their house out of hemp. Having never built a house before, Dan decided his first would be his dream home — a sustainable, off-grid hemp house in Tasmania, rendered with a horse poo mix and with an outdoor composting toilet.
The Long Road to End Tuberculosis
Free Ebooks for Getting Free (Not the Free Thread)
Haymarket Books is offering 10 free ebooks on a range of topics relating to anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist thought and action, alongside an 80% off sale, making all of their other ebooks only $2 each. The free bundle features Angela Davis and Rebecca Solnit, along with others (list in the readmore). While the sale ends on November 15th, the free ebooks should be available until November 22nd. [more inside]
Deflock the Surveillance State
DeFlock is a crowd-sourced map of Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) around the world. Want to post an ALPR in your town? Logon to Open Street Map and follow these handy instructions! (via 404 Media)
Globally great guitar
Forget about Hendrix, Beck, Clapton, Page and Van Halen; we want to highlight the guitarists who have made an impact outside of the usual rock’n’roll axis of axes. It’s a list full of invention, customs passed down through generations and a focus on rhythm as much as volume. These are the musicians who defined soukous, bossa nova and Touareg desert blues, who soundtracked revolutions and revelations, and made their traditions that little more recognisable to a global audience. These are our guitar heroes... from 50 Global Guitar Greats [Songlines]
Ella Jenkins, Chicago's first lady of children's music, dies at 100
“I got interested in percussion — tapping on tin cans, boxes, knees. I sang. I whistled. Though, `Girls don’t whistle,’ my mother told me.” Recognized with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement award in 2004, she was known by generations of children for her folk songs, featuring simple tunes and call and response lyrics.
Among her many honors, she is a featured artist in the Smithsonian Folkways collection.
A forthcoming biography entitled This Is Rhythm
Ella Jenkins, Children’s Music, and the Long Civil Rights Movement will come out in April.
There is also a documentary in the works.
Check Out the Stunning New Images of Jupiter From NASA’s Juno Spacecraft
NASA’s Juno spacecraft has just released stunning images of Jupiter, captured during its 66th flyby of the largest and oldest planet in our solar system. The Juno mission has been studying the Jovian system—Jupiter, along with its rings and many moons—to learn about the giant planet’s formation and evolution with the hope that it might shed light on the development of the entire solar system, per a NASA statement. The solar-powered spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in August 2011 and reached Jupiter in July 2016.
A new single-take video from Jungle
What is your happy place?
Everybody needs a happy place. What's yours? What's a place you can visit or even just think about that gives you a sense of calm and relaxation? If yours is the semi-regular #freethread on MeFi, boy do I have good news for you... You are there.
"Interior Chinatown" on Hulu, Nov. 19
"Just a month before its debut on Hulu, the first trailer for Interior Chinatown has been released. Based on the 2020 novel of the same name by Charles Yu, who won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, the series will follow Silicon Valley’s Jimmy O. Yang as Willis Wu, who accidentally witnesses a crime and starts to discover family secrets and Chinatown's criminal underground." [more inside]
Which Contemporary Film Snob Director Are You? a handy flowchart
It's dark, it's late, you're drunk, and you're ready to admit to MetaFilter that you're really a famous cult filmmaker. But if you're not sure, follow this handy flowchart by Adam Fromm: Which Contemporary Film Snob Director Are You? It's funny, it's clever, it's easy to navigate, it's a giant JPG image. [more inside]
Anti-Asian Structural Violence, an Example
Charlet Takahashi Chung, voice actress for Overwatch and other video games as well as films, documents and recounts (TW: trauma, PTSD, racism, misogyny, classism) in a series of Instagram posts her recent harrowing ordeal aboard a 4+hour long, Canada-U.S. flight on WestJet Airlines, where in the first-class cabin she was subjected to implicit racism and misogyny perpetrated by its entire flight crew and the instigating white passengers seated behind her; WestJet has remained practically silent. Chung used her phone to capture a Kafkaesque nightmare of distributed white supremacy, and she is making these recordings, written statement, and debriefing public to show the extraordinarily personal consequences of macro- and micro-aggressions. [more inside]
Microscope Museum
The Microscope Museum is an on-line 'collection of antique microscopes and other scientific instruments' (also available in Portuguese).
Something odd has happened with American memory
“Disinhibition” is a word that has recently migrated from the lexicon of psychology into that of American politics. It refers to a condition in which people become increasingly unable to regulate the expression of their impulses and urges, and this year it very obviously applied to Trump’s increasingly surreal, vituperative, and lurid rhetoric. But it now must also apply to the institutions of American government: with allies on the Supreme Court and with control over the Senate and (most probably at the time of writing) the House of Representatives, Trump will have no one to regulate his urges. from Letting It All Hang Out by Fintan O'Toole [The New York Review; ungated]
November 10
Hundreds of modified trees described as national treasure
Hundreds of modified trees on outback property in outback New South Wales described as a national treasure. You may have heard of scar trees, but how about trees-in-trees? These different types of modified trees tell a story about Indigenous culture, if you know how to read them. [more inside]
At Least Pumpkins Are Mostly Carbohydrates
i give the gift of gourd (SLYT). A decorative gourd-themed TikTok science debunk goes wrong.
We were alerted.
They will rock us Our current situation has been brewing for years and years, and the EBN has been there to alert us. [more inside]
Cheese-it, the cops!
According to Quinn, once drug cartels and other criminal operators gain a foothold into how a food business operates, they spot other opportunities. “They will infiltrate a legitimate business, take control of its distribution networks and use it to move other illegal items, including stolen food.” For criminal networks, food has other attractions. “They know crimes involving food result in less severe convictions than for importing drugs,” says Quinn, “but they can still make similar amounts of money.” Particularly if it’s a premium cheese. from Why luxury cheese is being targeted by black market criminals [BBC] [more inside]
Dobrawa Czocher - Live
Dobrawa Czocher - Live from the Festival de Música Visual de Lanzarote, Spain (October 2023) Dobrawa Czocher, a cellist who utilises live loops to essentially accompany herself, playing a fairly incredible set here in a fairly incredible location, the Cueva De Los Verdes, a series of volcanic caves deep below Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. [more inside]
People will travel more often and travel longer distances.
How Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it)
"To understand that America would rather elect a rapist than a woman."
The Fury Gap (slJessica Valenti, previously) 'Donald Trump’s win this week, bolstered by online shitposters and billionaire misogynists, has shifted something fundamental in young women. And while we’ll see plenty of ink spilled in election post-mortems about the online radicalization of young white men—as there should be—it would be a mistake to miss the story of how this election is doing something similar to their female counterparts.'
Our Cockroach Era
"They think your existence is a scourge? Then the best way to spite them is to keep existing." Geraldine DeRuiter (previously) has written the one thing that makes me feel better about what happened. Maybe it'll help you too.
"The clothes are really such a huge part of becoming a character"
"With the change in scenery comes a shift in style—most notably for Gomez’s sardonic true crime podcaster Mabel Mora." [more inside]
The most promising—and the most disappointing—fragment
When Fitzgerald died of a heart attack on the morning of December 21, 1940, he had written 44,000 words of a planned 50,000. It seems likely that the final version would have been longer, because Fitzgerald had covered only a little more than half of his outline. (By comparison, Gatsby, one of the great short novels of the Western canon, is 48,852 words.) He intended for Stahr to die at the end of the novel, symbolically defeated by his rivals and leaving his vision for the studio unfulfilled. This, for Fitzgerald, is what happens to extraordinary personalities: they are crushed by the coarseness and venality of the world. from Scott Fitzgerald’s Last Act [City Journal]
The Shogun is bad, I assume
Shōgun Showdown A Roguelite single-line tile turn tactics puzzler with a 16-bit dystopian Japan setting, guide your character through waves of enemies with a simple move set and surprising gameplay depth. [more inside]
November 9
Researcher who spies on echidnas' sex lives says there's a lot to learn
Researcher who spies on echidnas' sex lives says there's a lot to learn about the enigmatic animals.
For 35 years American researcher Peggy Rismiller has been studying Kangaroo Island's animals, from snakes to echidnas.
Some have Grape-Nuts thrust upon them
But making a breakfast cereal was not the original intention of Charles William Post, the founder of the Postum Cereal Company (better known these days as Post). After a stint at the Kellogg sanitarium in Battle Creek, Post started his own local company to sell health drinks, namely the caffeine-free coffee substitute called Postum. Grape-Nuts were actually intended to become a beverage, as well. But Post decided that Grape-Nuts would instead be marketed as the most super of all superfoods. from The Unlikely Popularity of Grape-Nuts Ice Cream [Atlas Obscura] [more inside]
Second Sunrise over New Mombasa
February, 2003: Following the smashing, console-defining success of Halo: Combat Evolved, developer Bungie was facing a conundrum. Fan and media interest in the long-anticipated sequel was at an all-time high, thanks to the release of an epic cinematic teaser in September. But despite a veteran team of top-tier designers bursting with new ideas, the game was not in a remotely playable state... and a real-time demo was scheduled for the high-profile E3 expo in May. So they buckled down, pushed their hardware to the limit, and produced EARTHCITY -- an ambitious, semi-scripted playable demo set to a majestic orchestral score that re-introduced the Master Chief and a host of innovative features in less than ten minutes. Played live in a private theater throughout the last day of the expo, the E3 demo was a massive hit with the press and the fans -- despite barely holding together through a series of last-minute hacks and visual trickery. For all its popularity, the demo's jankiness left it unsuitable for public release and languishing in the Bungie archives... until now. Thanks to the dedicated work of the Digsite crew of fan archivists, the original Halo 2 E3 2003 demo has been lovingly restored for re-release on the Master Chief Collection omnibus on Steam, just in time for Halo 2's 20th anniversary. You can download the files here, bask in a crisp HD recording, or watch one of the Digsite modders play through this and other unearthed gems live. [more inside]
Hail Great God, Lord of the Place of the Two Goddesses of What is Right
Ancient Egyptian Wooden Funerary Figures
Utilising stylistic traits to create a taxonomy of ancient Egyptian wooden funerary figures. [more inside]
Utilising stylistic traits to create a taxonomy of ancient Egyptian wooden funerary figures. [more inside]
"Their echo chamber doubles as this country’s largest media networks."
"What's blood for? If not for shedding?"
"I had to start dating upper-class girls to learn about shoes"
“Every time I sit down to write, I have a great fear that anything I write will reveal me as the monster I was always told I would be. But that fear is personal, something I must face in everything I do, every act I contemplate. Writing is an act that claims courage and meaning, and turns back denial, breaks open fear.” Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina (and the equally amazing Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, among others), has died. NYT obituary (archived).
Boss’s greed has G-O-T-T-O-G-O
Strike-friendly games from the NYT tech guild “New York Times tech workers are still on strike after walking out one day before the presidential election. That means they’re still asking people to skip their usual Crossword, Wordle, or Connections routines. But now, the union has released its own offerings for games lovers that could keep them from crossing the digital picket line.” - Fast Company [more inside]
Predistribution vs redistribution
“Compensate the Losers?” Economic Policy and Partisan Realignment in the US by Ilyana Kuziemko, Nicolas Longuet-Marx, and Suresh Naidu (thread @ dead bird, graph) [more inside]
The Arctic Seed Vault Shows the Flawed Logic of Climate Adaptation
"It’s smart to plan for the future. But the seed vault assumes that we know enough to plan effectively and that people will pay attention to what we know. History shows this is often not the case." [more inside]
Zoo elephants spotted using hoses
Why shower with your nose when you can use a hose? Zoo elephants adopt garden tech. Elephants in the Berlin Zoo were captured on video using a sophisticated tool — a hose — to take a shower and prank each other.
Hide my head, I want to drown my sorrow / No tomorrow, no tomorrow
The Most Insane Weapon You Never Heard About - "At the height of the Cold War, a terrifying concept emerged: a bomb so powerful it wouldn't need to be dropped. Known as Project Sundial, this doomsday device would have left a 400-km radius in flames and plunged the world into darkness. It was a bomb that would destroy everything – not a weapon, but an apocalypse. How close did we come to pressing the button?" (previously) [more inside]