November 11

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)
posted by slogger at 12:09 PM - 20 comments

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]
posted by chavenet at 11:36 AM - 25 comments

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.
posted by merriment at 9:17 AM - 7 comments

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.
posted by dancestoblue at 8:25 AM - 14 comments

A new single-take video from Jungle

"Let's Go Back" [more inside]
posted by Gorgik at 7:39 AM - 5 comments

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.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:57 AM - 65 comments

"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]
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:25 AM - 6 comments

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]
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 2:15 AM - 32 comments

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]
posted by polymodus at 1:56 AM - 52 comments

Microscope Museum

The Microscope Museum is an on-line 'collection of antique microscopes and other scientific instruments' (also available in Portuguese).
posted by misteraitch at 1:03 AM - 2 comments

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]
posted by chavenet at 12:35 AM - 18 comments

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]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:03 PM - 2 comments

At Least Pumpkins Are Mostly Carbohydrates

i give the gift of gourd (SLYT). A decorative gourd-themed TikTok science debunk goes wrong.
posted by BungaDunga at 5:30 PM - 10 comments

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]
posted by vrakatar at 4:01 PM - 14 comments

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]
posted by chavenet at 1:06 PM - 20 comments

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]
posted by dng at 12:43 PM - 3 comments

People will travel more often and travel longer distances.

How Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it)
posted by Lanark at 11:59 AM - 55 comments

"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.'
posted by box at 11:08 AM - 79 comments

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.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:23 AM - 27 comments

"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]
posted by cupcakeninja at 7:11 AM - 5 comments

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]
posted by chavenet at 2:04 AM - 5 comments

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]
posted by klangklangston at 12:45 AM - 6 comments

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.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:31 PM - 6 comments

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]
posted by chavenet at 1:27 PM - 58 comments

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]
posted by Rhaomi at 12:07 PM - 5 comments

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]
posted by thatwhichfalls at 11:51 AM - 2 comments

"Their echo chamber doubles as this country’s largest media networks."

Liberals, provably out of touch with America, must change their media diet (slSplinter)
posted by box at 11:30 AM - 151 comments

"What's blood for? If not for shedding?"

Tony Todd, the titular Candyman, the laconic coroner of Final Destination, dead at 69.
posted by Kitteh at 8:44 AM - 25 comments

"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).
posted by mittens at 7:22 AM - 14 comments

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]
posted by bunderful at 6:44 AM - 10 comments

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]
posted by jeffburdges at 6:40 AM - 16 comments

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]
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:22 AM - 15 comments

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.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:37 AM - 8 comments

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]
posted by kliuless at 4:56 AM - 16 comments

naturphilosophie

In the early 19th century, German naturalist Lorenz Oken quickly established himself as a leader in the Naturphilosophie [wiki] movement, a current of Idealism, which attempted to comprehend a total view of nature by investigating its theoretical structure—a precursor to the natural sciences as we know them today. Oken’s seminal work Allgemaine Naturgeschichte Für Alle Stände, or General Natural History For All Classes, was published as a series of seven volumes between 1833 and 1843. At more than 5,000 pages in its entirety, the atlas depicts known species ranging from beetles and fish to birds and ferns. ...Explore Oken’s entire Allgemaine Naturgeschichte in the Biodiversity Heritage Library’s digital archive [colossal/kate mothes] (previously)
posted by HearHere at 3:47 AM - 1 comment

"Looking for Answers at the Nancy Drew Convention"

Jadie Stillwell & Nicole Blackwood (LitHub, 11/2024), "Among the Sleuths": "the fictional detective became a mythic figure long ago. She's also, fittingly, something of a mystery herself." Related: the song "Nancy Drew" by Tuscadero. r/NancyDrew on most / least favorite, love-hate, & favorite game, and issues with newer games. Gab Smolders (previously) plays Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake and Mystery of the Seven Keys. Bonita Granville's 1930s movies, e.g. Nancy Drew... Detective and Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase. 70s TV show. Andrea Ruggirello (2018), "The Not-So-Hidden Racism of Nancy Drew." Trailer for the recent show now on Max (r/NancyDrew's comments; Vulture review of the pilot + ND overall). Katryn Bury (2023), "Revisiting Nancy Drew from a Modern (and Disabled and Queer) Perspective."
posted by Wobbuffet at 2:09 AM - 7 comments

absolutely ludicrous

Watching Rocky IV in 2024, however, was clarifying to me in the ongoing debate around "21st century cultural stasis." The basic argument is that culture is less healthy because there are fewer significant aesthetic changes. This implies a healthy ecosystem produces a large quantity of relics, as new styles outmode old ones. Songs that are "so Eighties" imply that the Nineties rejected all of those artistic choices. In the logic of the stasis narrative, if The Bourne Identity doesn’t scream 2002 with the same volume as Rocky IV screams 1985, culture must be slowing down. from Cultural Stasis Produces Fewer Cheesy Relics like Rocky IV [Culture]
posted by chavenet at 1:30 AM - 15 comments

"The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter."

The 100 Best Film Noirs of All Time...just what it says on the tin. [more inside]
posted by fairmettle at 12:50 AM - 33 comments

November 8

I Can't Drive 25

Via the Video Game Weather ASMR YT channel & This Week in Sound: Eight hours with no loops, "driving around the city of Los Santos in a thunderstorm on a lonely night . . . GTAV ASMR. Grand Theft Auto V recorded using an Elgato 4K60 Pro capture card with OBS and edited with Wondershare Filmora 11. Video game weather ambience for ASMR." No other sounds but you, in the car, driving very slowly through a thunderstorm, exploring the city. The streets are empty, nobody's around or awake. It's nighttime.
posted by not_on_display at 11:02 PM - 6 comments

Meanwhile use for housing

Housing model that's gold for women fleeing domestic violence. The model turns empty buildings into homes for vulnerable women and a shelter organisation wants it expanded to give more people a safe place to sleep at night amid the housing crisis.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:34 PM - 2 comments

The End of the Early Bronze Age

Did a mega drought topple empires 4,200 years ago? is an article by Michael Marshall in Nature [archive link] about the debate around the 4.2-Kiloyear Event, which was possibly a major shift in global climate patterns that started around 2200 BCE. The effects were especially stark in the Fertile Crescent, where social complexity decreased markedly, empires fell, and cities were abandoned, as recounted in the video essay The First Bronze Age Collapse and the Intermediate Bronze Age. If you want more granular detail, best known archaeological site for this period has a good website with lots of information, The Tell Leilan Project.
posted by Kattullus at 1:31 PM - 15 comments

A silver lining in Los Angeles: tenant lawyer ousts asshole incumbent

Ysabel Jurado has defeated incumbent Los Angeles City Councilmember Kevin de León. De León is a legend on L.A.'s eastside and in California politics: former California Assemblymember, former President of the State Senate, failed U.S. Senate candidate (against Diane Feinstein in 2017), and current Los Angeles City Councilmember. De León was one of four people (three councilmembers and a labor leader) in the 2022 Los Angeles City Council tapes scandal and the last to find consequence. Jurado is a political rookie, a lifelong resident of her council district, the queer daughter of Filipino immigrants, a tenants rights attorney, affordable housing activist, and single mom. [more inside]
posted by kensington314 at 1:02 PM - 8 comments

I WaNt ThE StOnEs AnD i WaNt ThEm NoW

If you live in Austria and started middle school in the past 15 years, chances are your English teacher has subjected you to The Story of the Stones. An animated fantasy series so astonishingly, epically cringeworthy that it has created something of a collective traume bond. [more inside]
posted by Omnomnom at 12:22 PM - 25 comments

Tetris is not just a fun diversion...

... but also has remarkable trauma-fighting properties, so play Tetris [so many Tetris previouslies]
posted by chavenet at 11:37 AM - 18 comments

12 AM on the Net

Nightfall Turn-based tactics with a hacker theme and light puzzle elements. This is a free remake of the classic 2002 web game Spybotics: The Nightfall Incident for modern PCs and web. The original was posted here in 2004
posted by klangklangston at 9:29 AM - 5 comments

Overwhelmed with fish

Record sockeye run numbers in Okanagan Valley. Salmon are returning to areas previously blocked by dams after hatchery efforts to reintroduce fish.
posted by Mitheral at 9:23 AM - 13 comments

Ollie Olsen 1958-2024

Ollie Olsen, visionary Australian post-punk and electronic music innovator, died on 16 October aged 66. Best known for his collaborations with the late Michael Hutchence of INXS, he made an extraordinary contribution to the Australian music scene and in particular its more avant-garde corners. ABC obituary, Guardian obituary, Ollie’s instagram, Wikipedia, Video memorial by Richard Lowenstein. [more inside]
posted by goo at 8:34 AM - 9 comments

A 17.9 feet long crocodile

Investigation begins to learn exact age of dead crocodile, Cassius. A scientist hopes to learn more about the exact age of the iconic record-breaking 5.48-metre long (17.9 feet long) saltwater crocodile Cassius, believed to be up to 120 years old, after the croc died on 2 November 2024.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:57 AM - 16 comments

hiking

hello to the mountains of Nagano Prefecture. After two train rides and one on a bus, we were in Kamikochi, one of the most beautiful regions of the Japan Alps [soranews24/wiki]
posted by HearHere at 5:38 AM - 6 comments

"For God's sake, do you want them to think we are savages?"

Twilight Zone 1986 - A Small Talent for War "When an alien visitor tells delegates at the United Nations that humanity will be exterminated because it has 'a small talent for war,' the countries of the world struggle to forge a disarmament treaty before the visitor's deadline." (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by zaixfeep at 5:33 AM - 16 comments

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