MetaFilter

Mary Robinson (1801), Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Robinson [1st ed.--all vols.]: "'By Jove, Mrs. Robinson, you will make a conquest of the Prince; for to-night, you look handsomer than ever.' I smiled ... and little foresaw the vast variety of events that would arise from that night's exhibition!'" Robinson's relationship, agreement, and settlement with future King George IV are historically-notable contexts to the concluding portion of her sometimes Gothic-themed memoirs. She was also a fashion icon (and perhaps ambivalent about it). However, her Gothic poems (e.g. "The Haunted Beach" & "Golfre"), her novels, her feminism [PDF], her personal experience of debtors' "Captivity," and her poems on subaltern populations and slavery--sharp responses to other Romantic poets [PDF] during an era contextualized in Bengalis in London's East End [PDF], "The Global Indies," and Black London [PDF; other formats]--remain notable today. Previously: 25 Playwrights and their Plays.
posted by Wobbuffet at 9:02 PM PST - 2 comments

Basketle If you love Wordle but you also are a basketball freak then I introduce you Basketle! 5 letters, 6 guesses (just like Wordle) and a wide variety of NBA players, teams or coaches acceptable as answers (current and past). [more inside]
posted by andrewmc at 5:35 PM PST - 15 comments

Captain's Log, stardate 92518. Sensors have detected unusual melodic sequences emanating from Ceti Alpha VI V. Captain's Log, Doubles Jubilee supplemental. Additional scans have revealed a more evolved form of this Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan musical created by songwriter and game designer @Brentalfloss including a teaser trailer of the show's live readings.
posted by Servo5678 at 4:18 PM PST - 6 comments

Strong Songs is a podcast about music and what makes it good. Host Kirk Hamilton has an infectious enthusiasm and a knack for explaining what's going on in a song, from effects pedals to vocal layering to the thump, pop, and sizzle of percussion. ob1quizote introduced MetaFilter to Strong Songs with the episode on Scenes from an Italian Restaurant (Billy Joel), but the podcast has featured a ton of great songs, including September (Earth, Wind & Fire), You've Got a Friend (Carole King), and Satisfied (Hamilton, the Musical). Happy Doubles Jubilee! [more inside]
posted by kristi at 2:55 PM PST - 8 comments

The Brunching Shuttlecocks was (and is) a humor website that ran from 1997 to 2003. It was founded by David Neilsen and Lore Fitzgerald Sjöberg There's a TON more links inside, but here's a taste: Porn Star or My Little Pony?  *  Ratings: Cat Toys ("Catnip Anything: Very entertaining.")  *  Ratings: Star Wars Lego Figures  *  The Björk Song (In RealAudio or MP3, with David Neilsen. Causes insanity.)  *  Pikachewy ("'Twas Beedrill, and the Starmie Gloom/Did Grimer and Gengar in the Mew")  *  Twelve AP Headlines Which Can Be Sung to 'Camptown Races' ("Man in Wheelchair Killed by Train, doo-dah, doo-dah")  *  The Geek Hierarchy: Abridged But Managable - Unabridged but Large - For Printing (PDF) (Doubles Jubilee, original from 2015) [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 1:27 PM PST - 43 comments

"The classic version of the rope trick [PDF] is performed during the day, in the open and with the performer completely surrounded. The performer causes a rope to magically snake into the air and remain erect. His boy assistant then scurries up to the top of the rope and promptly disappears." Richard Wiseman and Peter Lamont explore its history and representation in the West and ask whether or not it ever actually happened. (via Squaring the Strange podcast.) [more inside]
posted by eotvos at 8:40 AM PST - 12 comments

This review of a Michelin starred restaurant in Birmingham (UK) is the purest ode to the joy of great food and a place that cares about the experience of eating it. [more inside]
posted by mr_stru at 5:32 AM PST - 57 comments

Part two of the Russia orders troops into Ukraine thread. Also on mefi: Ukraine, Russia and space and the story of the Ghost of Kyiv. Over in metatalk, for mefites directly affected and ways to help, a metatalk thread, and remembering the Shire, a quiet respite thread when you need a break.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 4:18 AM PST - 850 comments

Stevie Wonder performed Superstition live on sesame street in 1973. It's two minutes longer than the album version and, although the video has a sort of VHS-y quality to it, it still owns. [more inside]
posted by dismas at 10:09 PM PST - 40 comments

Ann Lemoine, publisher (1800 [1st ed.]), New Lights from the World of Darkness; or the Midnight Messenger; with Solemn Signals from the World of Spirits: "The wife of a very eminent bookseller in the city, who died soon after her husband, in 1790, used frequently to appear to a friend of her husband's, near Charles's Square, entirely encircled in a thick blue vapour, and which, upon her disappearing, always left a very strong scent." At The Women's Print History Project (home of a database listing >10k publications), Sara Penn discusses "England's First Female Chapbook Publisher" and "Ann Lemoine's 'Haunted Castle'" [the text]. See also Jonathan Barry's publishing history of supernatural tales [PDF] and Angela Koch's checklist of Gothic bluebooks. Previously: Weird Tales from the 18th Century.
posted by Wobbuffet at 9:00 PM PST - 2 comments

"If you play Go seriously there is a chance that you will get exposed to this experience that is kind of like nothing else on the planet. Go is putting you in a place where you're always at the very farthest reaches of your capacity." --Frank Lantz, director of the NYU game center, from the opening of the AlphaGo documentary. The film chronicles the historic Go match between DeepMind's AlphaGo and Lee Sedol in 2016, and is available in its entirety on YouTube. [more inside]
posted by okonomichiyaki at 4:49 PM PST - 21 comments

Updates from February 2022 in space. The human effort to explore space continued this month, intersecting the Russian invasion of Ukraine. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 4:19 PM PST - 24 comments

> comp.basilisk - Frequently Asked Questions :: Is it just an urban legend that the first basilisk destroyed its creator?
Almost everything about the incident at the Cambridge IV supercomputer facility where Berryman conducted his last experiments has been suppressed and classified as highly undesirable knowledge. It's generally believed that Berryman and most of the facility staff died. Subsequently, copies of basilisk B-1 leaked out. This image is famously known as the Parrot for its shape when blurred enough to allow safe viewing. B-1 remains the favorite choice of urban terrorists who use aerosols and stencils to spray basilisk images on walls by night. But others were at work on Berryman's speculations... [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 4:11 PM PST - 16 comments

Technovelgy lists inventions from science fiction novels. Previously on MeFi (in 2004, 2006, 2009, 2011, 2012, and a couple other times too), the site catalogues the fantastic doodads imagined by writers—right alongside nonfictional tech news that dovetails with the scifi.
posted by Monochrome at 4:00 PM PST - 5 comments

How eugenics shaped statistics.
posted by spamandkimchi at 1:58 PM PST - 17 comments

Cavett, Arnaz, Burnett, and Ball [1h6m] Dr Ferdie Pacheco discusses the previous night's Ali/Frasier fight briefly, but then Lucie Arnaz comes out to discuss her famous childhood, and soon Carol Burnett joins her, and finally Lucille Ball joins them to end the hour. It's a wonderful slice of television from a much previous age, full of fun.
posted by hippybear at 12:14 PM PST - 14 comments

After all these years, Tonetta is still dropping lo-fi, weird-ass, fabulously freakshow music and videos. [NSFW] [more inside]
posted by youarenothere at 7:40 PM PST - 3 comments

brainwane has posted extraordinary numbers of wonderful stories to MetaFilter - but my very favorite was posted back in 2013. "Tomorrow Is Waiting", a short science fiction story by Holli Mintzer, published in Strange Horizons, finds a student's half-hearted AI project gone delightfully out of control. It is the best story about Kermit the Frog you will ever read. Author Holli Mintzer appeared in the original post. Happy Doubles Jubilee!
posted by kristi at 6:46 PM PST - 18 comments

Deep conversation between father & daughter. A little levity in our continually stressful times, especially this past week. Tiny beagle Lilly has SO MUCH to say! (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by Glinn at 6:18 PM PST - 7 comments

As Doubles Jubilee nears its end, let us return to the wonderfully cheesy 1980's educational children's TV fantasies of Through the Dragon's Eye and Storylords (bonus - article about the latter and footage of a school visit from its villain). Below the fold, the vast majority of the former show's other seasons (now with updated links for #13 and #18 and cassette audio versions of #12, #14 and some of #18 - the only incomplete thing of the lot). [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 6:02 PM PST - 2 comments

The weather is warming up, so that means it's the start of the annual campaign against the many weeds that seed themselves all over our garden, which means I'll be leaning on The Seed Site a lot. [more inside]
posted by vincebowdren at 12:05 PM PST - 14 comments

Pixelfed: a potential open source alternative to Instagram. Tired of the algorithm telling you what to watch? Or maybe you want a little less Meta/Facebook in your life? Not trying to make a bunch of money and just share your photos? Check out Pixelfed. It's like the Mastodon of image sharing apps. Open source, distributed, no algorithm and no advertising.
posted by mecran01 at 11:25 AM PST - 44 comments

In 2008 and 2011, we explored the early history of two titans of children's television. Starting in the '80s, fresh off success with MTV, producer Fred Seibert helped revitalize a struggling Nickelodeon with a comprehensive brand overhaul -- infectious doowop jingles, surreal interstitials, and a visionary slate of original shorts that brought it "from worst to first" in the ratings. In the '90s, he followed suit at Cartoon Network, working with creative director Michael Ouweleen on a series of inventive musical idents that reinterpreted the network's properties through stock footage, indie music, and original animation in a wide variety of styles, along with another groundbreaking roster of shorts that, along with the Nicktoons, would become some of the most famous in the history of American animation. [warning: Frankenstein's monster post inside] [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 10:55 AM PST - 14 comments

Modulations is a 1998 documentary that captures the depth and breadth and history and evolution and culture of electronic music... WHATEVER THAT MIGHT MEAN. It's a bit meandering at times, kind of stream of consciousness, but it pretty much captures it all, from that moment in time.
posted by hippybear at 10:30 AM PST - 10 comments

Netizens have shared clips of a Ukrainian fighter pilot, now being celebrated as “Ghost of Kyiv”, who has allegedly shot down six Russian aircraft. The videos of the “Ghost of Kyiv” have spread like wildfire on social media. Many on Twitter are calling the Ukrainian pilot the “first European ace since World War II”. Many of these videos have already been debunked, but the former Ukraine president wants to believe. Does it even matter if he's real? The ‘Ghost of Kyiv’ Is The Mythical Hero Ukraine Needs Right Now
posted by webmutant at 10:20 AM PST - 33 comments

I've just discovered these via Langridge's HotelFred website, which lets you read them free online or download them if you have the right app. The first two titles listed are mini-comics (about weight loss and witches respectively), then there's The Iron Duchess (featuring Fred the Clown), The Thirteenth Floor (an early graphic novel project) and The Great McGonagall (chapters to date of his book about the world's worst poet). [more inside]
posted by Paul Slade at 4:11 AM PST - 7 comments

Gang Starr - Manifest
Heavy D and the Boyz - We Got Our Own Thang
Queen Latifah - Dance For Me
Kid 'N Play - 2 Hype
Slick Rick - Hey Young World
Salt-N-Pepa - Let's Talk About Sex
De La Soul - Me, Myself and I
Kwame - The Man We All Know and Love
Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth - They Reminisce Over You

Previously

Once again, a quick two week Free Trial of YouTube Premium is recommended [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 1:30 PM PST - 18 comments

Anti-vaxer Stephanie Sibbio's childhood friends talk about their friendship, their friend's black-or-white thinking, "mama bear" identity, how social media replaced actual friendships, and her slide into extremism on an emotionally complex episode of the Conspirituality podcast.

Must-read essay "That Time When I Was in a Cult and Got a Loving Letter from a Friend" by Matthew Remski (co-host of Conspirituality and interviewer on this episode) reflects on how a friend opened a door to the possibility of life outside of the cult: "he takes me seriously, and tries to imagine and validate my inner life, even as he feels alienated from it." (archive.org version)
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:52 PM PST - 25 comments

Ellis Brooks: My 24-Hour Experiment With Dystopian Food Units. This meal was made up of vacuum-sealed reconstituted food units. There were three units of salmon, two of sweet potato, and one of asparagus. They looked like protein pellets for the discerning survivalist.
posted by Cash4Lead at 10:55 AM PST - 121 comments

Biden to nominate Ketanji Brown Jackson to be first Black woman to sit on Supreme Court (CNN). Jackson has broad experience, including work as a member of the US Sentencing Commission and as a federal public defender. [more inside]
posted by kristi at 8:29 AM PST - 56 comments

Arooj Aftab, who recently became the first Pakistani woman to be nominated for a Grammy, did a stunningly lovely and tranquil NPR Tiny Desk (Home) Concert in convent in Brooklyn late last year, singing in Urdu with a chamber ensemble that includes Celtic harpist Maeve Gilchrist, classical guitarist Gyan Riley, violinist Darian Donovan Thomas, and bassist/synth player Shahzad Ismaily. [more inside]
posted by yasaman at 8:35 PM PST - 22 comments

A languid barely-chat with Octavia St Laurent as Michael Alsando does her hair for Jack Mizrahi's Legends Ball in 2005: Part 1 | Part 2 [more inside]
posted by youarenothere at 8:09 PM PST - 4 comments

‘He Slipped My Radar, and I’m F–ked Up About It’: Furries Speak Out About Alleged Portland Shooter [Rolling Stone, Archive.org link] A very small but vocal far-right contingency has long plagued the furry community. Now it appears that online hate may have turned into real-world violence. Obvious content warnings.
posted by hippybear at 7:24 PM PST - 35 comments

Originally released back in 2008, Canadian indie horror flick Pontypool [trailer] is a modern zombie tale quite unlike any other. Loosely based on a dense, complicated novel by Tony Burgess and inspired by Orson Welles' War of the Worlds, it tells the story of Grant Mazzy, a grumbling yet likable radio host (played by veteran character actor Stephen McHattie) whose penchant for philosophical ramblings gets him booted from Toronto to the sleepy winter pastures of Pontypool, Ontario. One bleak morning, as the outspoken Mazzy chafes against no-nonsense producer Sydney Briar (played by McHattie's wife Lisa Houle!), disturbing news begins rolling in of a series of bizarre and violent incidents sweeping the town. Trapped in their church basement broadcasting booth, Mazzy, Briar, and intern Laurel-Ann Drummond struggle to understand the odd nature of the crisis and warn the wider world before it's too late. But this is no ordinary virus, and they find their efforts may be causing far more harm than good. You can watch the film on YouTube or Kanopy, but if you're pressed for time you can also experience it in its more logical form: as a one-hour BBC radio drama [Archive.org audio version] voiced by the original cast (albeit with a different ending). And after the credits, make sure not to miss the film's playful non-sequitur coda [analysis] -- which was spun off into the buckwild 2020 "sequel" Dreamland starring McHattie, Houle, Juliette Lewis, and Henry Rollins. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 3:16 PM PST - 28 comments

The button has an obfuscating function that places it within a long list of techniques for evoking autonomy within control: all manner of “placebo buttons”; the layout of a theme park or department store; complicated privacy settings where users are overwhelmingly likely to choose the default. It reifies autonomy itself, turning it into an external commodity. This strategy, part of the blueprint for digital capitalism, is today writ large in massively popular games and gaming platforms — from Pokémon GO to Roblox — which allow a user the freedom to roam within a world of the game’s making, while siphoning off their labor. from Search Party: Why does Google still have that “I’m Feeling Lucky” button?
posted by chavenet at 12:39 PM PST - 39 comments

Barefoot Gen (English sub-titled) (dubbed) Barefoot Gen is a 1983 Japanese anime war drama film loosely based on the Japanese manga series of the same name by Keiji Nakazawa. Directed by Mori Masaki and starring Issei Miyazaki, Masaki Kōda and Tatsuya Jo, it depicts World War II in Japan from a child's point of view revolving around the events surrounding the bombing of Hiroshima and the main character's first hand experience of the bomb. IMDb Wikipedia [more inside]
posted by dancestoblue at 10:26 AM PST - 8 comments

J. Kenji López-Alt Applies His Scientific Method to Seattle’s Food Scene (Allecia Vermillion @ Seattle Met) To Seattle home cooks, his arrival was the food equivalent of Steph Curry buying a Tudor on the edge of Capitol Hill, then playing pickup games at various neighborhood parks. [more inside]
posted by CrystalDave at 10:19 AM PST - 33 comments

An Exquisite Corpse from the minds of Hidetaka Miyazaki (Dark Souls) and George RR Martin, Elden Ring is currently one of the best-reviewed games in modern history [Announcement Trailer][Reveal Trailer][Launch Trailer] [*Discussion may contain spoilers*] [more inside]
posted by mysticreferee at 7:42 AM PST - 79 comments

The Waco Biker Shootout Left Nine Dead. Why Was No One Convicted? NY Times Magazine [more inside]
posted by Bee'sWing at 4:47 AM PST - 33 comments

#breakingcodesilence is a campaign organized by survivors of the "tough love" schools of the troubled teen industry. [CW: many kinds of abuse] [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 11:22 PM PST - 41 comments

Try Weird Fruit. A Letter of Recommendatioin from the NYT. "...Some astronauts report experiencing the “overview effect,” a sense of mental clarity and connectedness to humankind that overcomes them when they look down at Earth from space. I feel that on a cellular level when I pick up a mangosteen, a celestial-purple orb with a flower-stem hat. It looks as if it were conceived for a Miyazaki film, its proportions so cutesy that it demands to be anthropomorphized. Inside are pillowy white segments, oneiric in texture and taste, with notes of pineapple, strawberry, lychee and your most carefree memory of childhood. The experience is no less expansive than seeing the ocean or hearing a Chopin nocturne for the first time. " [more inside]
posted by storybored at 9:02 PM PST - 66 comments

In the seventeenth century, Japanese printers began creating a type of book for the illiterate, allowing them to recite sutras and other devotional prayers, without knowledge of any written language. The texts work by a rebus principle (known as hanjimono), where each drawn image, when named aloud, sounds out a Chinese syllable, akin to how the emoji sequence 👁 🅰️ ◀️ 🚍 approximates the phonetics of “I read a rebus” (I + “red A” + “re” + “bus”)...the chosen pictograms reflected the lived experience of their “readers”: the implements of work and rice farming (sieves, saws, paddies); domestic animals (from rats to monkeys); and imagery related to fertility, pregnancy, disease, and death.

Reciting Pictures: Buddhist Texts for the Illiterate [more inside]
posted by youarenothere at 7:04 PM PST - 13 comments

21 years ago this month, Cartoon Network aired a very special episode of The Powerpuff Girls. Though nominally a harmless kids series about three adorable kindergarten superheroes, creator Craig McCracken attracted an unexpectedly diverse audience (50% male, 25% adult) by sneaking in a surprising amount of violent mood whiplash and adult in-jokes -- and on that last point, this particular episode was king. Broadcast on the 37th anniversary of their debut on the Ed Sullivan Show, "Meet the Beat-Alls" was an extended and sophisticated metaphor for the rise and fall of The Beatles, cramming more than forty song references and dozens of visual jokes into only ten minutes of animated allegory. Catch the original episode here or read the transcript, but for the full effect, watch this remarkable YouTube mash-up (playable via the Wayback Machine!) that splices the referenced song clips directly into the audio track. Want more PPG goodness? You can start with the special "Powerpuff Girls Rule!!!", a sly, hyperkinetic celebration of the show's tenth anniversary directed by McCracken himself that features every character (and totally subverts an important one). But as far as weirdness goes, it's hard to top Powerpuff Girls Doujinshi, a long-running fan-made webcomic which stars the trio alongside Dexter, Samurai Jack, Invader Zim, and tons of other network icons in an unusually dark manga adventure. Oh, and don't forget your plate of beans. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 3:15 PM PST - 30 comments

The inaugural "AlphaCon" was hosted at the Grand America hotel in Salt Lake City this past weekend. For a mere $3000 you could see a series of motivational speakers including disgraced founder of OUR Tim Ballard, someone named The Bull, and a smattering of fringe speakers giving business advice like hiring your own documentarian to grow your YouTube channel. Local columnist Meg Walter went and was kicked out after 1 day and 2 minutes of attendance, leaving her with a wonderful article on the experience.
posted by msbutah at 1:46 PM PST - 61 comments

Nearly two years ago, in spring 2020, CNN found itself with a blockbuster. The network put anchor Chris Cuomo on air interviewing his brother, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, about his state’s response to COVID-19. The string of segments made Andrew Cuomo a liberal hero, feted as the anti–Donald Trump, and the fraternal jibes between the men made for entertaining viewing.

The term blockbuster is borrowed from a massive bomb–and this one has gone off with devastating results. Andrew Cuomo was forced to step down this past August. Chris Cuomo was fired in December. CNN’s worldwide president, Jeff Zucker, has resigned. [The Atlantic] [more inside]
posted by riruro at 12:45 PM PST - 27 comments

(CW: transphobia throughout). Greg Abbot has officially directed Family and Protective Services to begin investigating all trans children in Texas and prosecuting their parents as child abusers. An informative (and justifiably angry) Twitter thread explaining what this means from @ErinInTheMorn. How to help.
posted by fight or flight at 10:05 AM PST - 100 comments

Forgotten books: The application of unseen species models to the survival of culture "According to a new paper published in the journal Science, {paywalled] an international team of researchers has adapted an ecological "unseen species" model to estimate how many medieval European stories in the chivalric romance or heroic tradition survived and how much has been lost. "
posted by dhruva at 9:40 AM PST - 6 comments

"One of his generation's most soulful singers". Mark Lanegan, lead singer of Screaming Trees and floating member of Queens of the Stone Age passed away yesterday at his home in Killarney, Ireland, age 57. As well as Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age, Lanegan released 11 solo albums, worked with Greg Dulli as The Gutter Twins, released three albums with Isobel Cambell, and was lead vocalist and co-writer on the Soulsavers album "It's Not How Far You Fall, It's the Way You Land".
posted by garrett at 8:44 AM PST - 51 comments

S is for Science: The making of 3-2-1 Contact by Ingrid Ockert (Physics Today, January 2021) tells the story of the processes behind the creation of the beloved children's science show. [more inside]
posted by RobinofFrocksley at 7:26 AM PST - 17 comments

In 2021, almost 65% of new cars sold in Norway were electric, up from 20.8 percent in 2017. Among private buyers (i.e. not leasing or fleet sales) the number was 83.1%. The secret sauce is still incentives.
posted by Harald74 at 6:54 AM PST - 81 comments

Eleven years ago Smithsonian Magazine published an in-depth examination[1] of the Finnish education system (and what the U.S. can learn from the Finns). Here's a quote: "Schools provide food, medical care, counseling and taxi service if needed. Student health care is free... Besides Finnish, math and science, the first graders take music, art, sports, religion and textile handcrafts. English begins in third grade, Swedish in fourth. By fifth grade the children have added biology, geography, history, physics and chemistry." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 11:11 PM PST - 37 comments

Russia states that Luhansk and Donetsk are independent of Ukraine, and orders troops into those territories. Transcript of Putin's speech. War appears imminent. Ukraine is calling up reservists. The EU is imposing sanctions on Russia, including halting the Nordstream 2 natural-gas pipeline, with additional measures once Russian troops move past the contact line in eastern Ukraine. The US is imposing sanctions as well. [more inside]
posted by russilwvong at 3:42 PM PST - 1040 comments

The Glutton Bowl: The World's Greatest Eating Challenge was first mentioned on the Blue twenty years ago. In 2002, athletes compete by eating more things than the competition, which was sanctioned by the International Federation of Competitive Eating. Final event was cow brains. These appear to be par-boiled. The champ ("What an athlete!") ate ten pounds. No mention of BSE, then rampant. A review from 2016: "Even after watching this again for the first time since it aired nearly 15 years ago, I can honestly say that Glutton Bowl may be the single worst thing to ever hit primetime television ever..." High praise indeed!
posted by CCBC at 3:26 PM PST - 11 comments

Stephen Biesty is an award-winning British illustrator famous for his bestselling "Incredible" series of engineering art books: Incredible Cross-Sections, Incredible Explosions, Incredible Body,  and many more. A master draftsman, Biesty does not use computers or even rulers in composing his intricate and imaginative drawings, relying on nothing more than pen and ink, watercolor, and a steady hand. Over the years, he's adapted his work to many other mediums, including pop-up books, educational games (video), interactive history sites, and animation. You can view much of his work in the zoomable galleries on his professional page, or click inside for a full listing of direct links to high-resolution, desktop-quality copies from his and other sites, including several with written commentary from collaborator Richard Platt [site, .mp3 chat]. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 3:14 PM PST - 8 comments

After reading Toddles' Do You Know Who That Worker You Just Hired Really Is and the wide variety of opinions from Mefites, it was fascinating to read this article on the BBC website "The elaborate con that tricked dozens into working for a fake design agency". [more inside]
posted by ElasticParrot at 3:10 PM PST - 22 comments

The Modernist Journals Project digitizes English-language literary magazines from the 1890s to the 1920s, along with essays and other supplementary materials from the period. [more inside]
posted by youarenothere at 11:51 AM PST - 14 comments

Cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz, a researcher and author specializing in dog cognition, offers up--not an obituary, but an elegy--to her research subject and beloved family member, Finnegan. [more inside]
posted by drlith at 11:27 AM PST - 11 comments

The Alternative Vote: A solution to the democratic deficit? This November 2021 presentation from Fair Vote Canada provides, in my opinion, a comprehensive treatment of the serious short-comings to non-proportional (winner-take-all) ranked ballot systems. Will the Ontario decision distract us from real reform? As Canada comes to terms with convoy blockades and the Ottawa Occupation, we need to look past the Emergency Act and determine whether changing how we elect our (provincial and national) governments can point to long-term solutions to long-simmering regional frictions and electoral distortions (and believe me, any Albertan can tell you all about distortions).
posted by elkevelvet at 10:57 AM PST - 29 comments

[The American] welfare system has long spent generously on the old, but it has consistently skimped on the young. Why America Has Been So Stingy In Fighting Child Poverty
posted by meowzilla at 9:59 AM PST - 42 comments

"During our pilot study, we found out how quickly magpies team up to solve a group problem. Within 10 minutes of fitting the final tracker, we witnessed an adult female without a tracker working with her bill to try and remove the harness off of a younger bird. Within hours, most of the other trackers had been removed. By day three, even the dominant male of the group had its tracker successfully dismantled."
posted by clawsoon at 8:42 AM PST - 44 comments

Machine Tool Fixture 25 is a colorful animation of a mechanical movement. One of over 3600(!) Youtube animations of mechanisms in motion by Youtuber thang010146. A unique catalog of human creativity. (Hat tip to thePrepared.org). See also 507 Mechanical Movements.
posted by storybored at 7:45 AM PST - 3 comments

Happy Twosday! Today (February 22 2022) is, in some formats, both a palindrome and an ambigram! Some people consider it a lucky day, but maybe we should ask ourselves what's really in a number? Celebrate this once in a lifetime event by doing things twice, having two tacos for Taco Twosday, by getting married, or just typing "Twosday" into Google!
posted by fight or flight at 4:41 AM PST - 32 comments

The Star Wars Sequels: Disney's Anti-Trilogy Star Wars scholar So Uncivilized dives into the sins of the sequel series from The Force Awakens devolving Han Solo into an anti-hero, The Last Jedi subverting itself, and The Rise of Skywalker existing, and in doing so, creates an anti-trilogy intrinsically tied to the past while opposed to it.
posted by Apocryphon at 8:05 PM PST - 149 comments

Pete Cannon runs an old school type track on an Atari ST, Cubase 4 and AKAI sampler. In another video for Sound on Sound Magazine, he adds an Amiga and Octamed tracker to the kit and demonstrates the workflow that was used back in the day. [more inside]
posted by pyramid termite at 6:32 PM PST - 17 comments

Two-time New York City Marathon champion Germán Silva is running the length of Mexico — up mountains, across desert, through narco territory Kevin Sieff/The Washington Post Feb. 18, 2022
posted by bq at 4:43 PM PST - 13 comments

YouTube's The 8-Bit Guy brings you 108 Rare and Bizarre Media Types [37m] which is not entirely satisfactory with its exploration of what everything is used for, but is certainly a gallery of storage that you probably didn't know about. Entertaining in a geeky way.
posted by hippybear at 3:54 PM PST - 37 comments

Twelve years on, Ted Chiang remains perhaps the finest author in contemporary science fiction -- and the most rarefied. A technical writer by trade and a graduate of the distinguished Clarion Writers Workshop, Chiang has published only eighteen short stories in the last thirty years, one and a half dozen masterpieces of the genre whose insightful, precise, often poetic language confronts fundamental ideas -- intelligence, consciousness, the nature of God -- and thrusts them into a dazzling new light. His collected works, mostly available in the anthologies Stories of Your Life and Others (2010) and Exhalation: Stories (2019), have cemented his reputation as one of the greatest SF storytellers of all time (and inspired one of the best SF movies of all time). Click inside for a complete listing of Chiang's work, with links to online reprints or audio versions where available, as well as a collection of one-on-one interviews, links to his other writings, video essays, movie clips, and lots more. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 2:42 PM PST - 34 comments

The old story is that eros induces self-destruction by way of emotion: it controls, redirects, and poisons one’s feelings. But eros commits crimes of passion because, first and foremost, it commits crimes of thought. It attacks the heart by way of the mind. Eros is an intellectual monster. from The Eros Monster by Agnes Callard [Harper's; Archive]
posted by chavenet at 2:39 PM PST - 14 comments

Dr. Paul Farmer, global health champion, Harvard Medical School professor, anthropologist and founder of the nonprofit health organization Partners in Health, has died at age 62. Farmer was the subject of Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder
posted by theora55 at 9:59 AM PST - 33 comments

Who has two thumbs and is not sure without looking which one he uses to hit the spacebar while he's typing up a new Free Thread post? This guy! [Imagine me pointing at myself with both the spacebar and non-spacebar thumbs]. It turns out it's the right thumb, btw. Anyway, come on in and chatter about whatever!
posted by cortex at 9:35 AM PST - 164 comments

Brazilian artist Hidreley Diao (@hidreley) has been using artificial intelligence (AI) to breathe photographic life into the portraits and sculptures of Mozart, Beethoven, Shakespeare and more, posting the fascinating results to his Instagram page. See also this twitter thread.
posted by contrapositive at 4:02 AM PST - 27 comments

Did Chris Kattan pen a reimagining of Peter Sellers' Being There with his "sexually charged, apple-fiending, monkey-like character" Mr. Peepers as the lead role? Perhaps so: Peepers, a canticle [Scribd, requires login; archive.org, imperfect formatting but absurdity intact] [more inside]
posted by youarenothere at 10:11 PM PST - 33 comments

Revealed: Credit Suisse leak unmasks criminals, fraudsters and corrupt politicians [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:35 PM PST - 32 comments

Soul Music is a long running BBC radio series. Each episode focuses on a particular piece of music, concentrating less on the artists behind it, but on the way the music has affected its listeners. Recent episodes have featured songs by Massive Attack, John Denver and Nina Simone. Besides pop songs, it covers classical, hymns, folk, jazz and more. The music is mostly drawn from the Anglophone world, but it ventures further afield too, like Finland, Japan, Wales, France, and South Africa. Hua Hsu wrote about Soul Music for The New Yorker in a piece called The Anti-Explainer Insight of “Soul Music”.
posted by Kattullus at 2:20 PM PST - 7 comments

The wildly inimitable Chris Fleming sings his Boba (Tea) Manifesto. When you talk to me in the morning, / I talk like the owner of a wolf sanctuary, / but after boba, I talk like the owner / of a boutique children's clothing store.
posted by rorgy at 12:49 PM PST - 13 comments

Everybody knows TVTropes is the best and most time-killing-est way to learn about the clichés and archetypes that permeate modern media. But dear reader, there is so much more. Enter UsefulNotes. Originally created as a place for tropers to pool factual information as a writing aid, the subsite has quietly grown into a small wiki of its own -- a compendium of crowdsourced wisdom on a staggering array of topics, all written in the site's signature brand of lighthearted snark. Though it reads like an irreverent and informal Wikipedia, its articles act as genuinely useful primers to complex and obscure topics alike, all in service of the project's three goals: "To debunk common media stereotypes; To help you understand some media better; To inform (and sometimes entertain) about subjects common in storytelling." Click inside for bountiful highlights... if you dare. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 12:25 PM PST - 11 comments

Recently, modding games to make them accessible for the blind has become somewhat recognized. From Hades to Hearthstone, the number of successful projects seems to be growing. Now, Stardew Valley is being brought into the fold, thanks to an enterprising modder with passion and skill. [more inside]
posted by Alensin at 10:25 AM PST - 4 comments

As reported by the BBC: After coming into contact with her oldest son Charles, who tested positive for COVID-19 a few days after seeing Queen Elizabeth.
posted by erattacorrige at 7:04 AM PST - 116 comments

Eunice, the cyclone which set an all-time wind speed record in the UK on Saturday and has caused fatalities and extensive damage (throughout Northern Europe), left TikTok user aishaxkhann stuck on a train somewhere along the East Coast Main Line connecting London to Edinburgh. While her train was moving, she filmed through a window and accidentally created what might as well be an advert for London North Eastern Railway (video may autoplay). Via Dan Barker’s reupload on Twitter.
posted by wachhundfisch at 7:02 AM PST - 17 comments

Rodney Stotts was looking to get a short-term "on the books" job so he'd have the paystubs he needed to convince landlords to rent him his own apartment, where he could more comfortably expand his real line of work--as a mid-level drug dealer in Southeast DC. The first employer who called him back was Earth Conservation Corps, an environmetal group focused on cleaning up the Anacostia River. There began Stotts' journey from drug dealing and prison to environmentalist and master falconer--perhaps unique among "escape from life on the streets" accounts. [more inside]
posted by drlith at 6:33 AM PST - 15 comments

Back in the distant past of cyberspace, there was MONDO 2000 magazine and for their first issue they wanted to interview William Gibson, the premiere cyberpunk author at the time. Unfortunately his agent wouldn't setup a meeting, so Timothy Leary offered an audio recording of his conversation with Gibson about a Neuromancer game that was going to accompany the movie release. Gibson claimed it was a drunken business meeting, but MONDO published it anyway: High Tech High Life: William Gibson & Timothy Leary in Conversation (1989). [more inside]
posted by autopilot at 6:09 AM PST - 19 comments

Some states have too many rescue dogs. Other states have people who want to adopt, but not enough rescue dogs. The solution? Fly the dogs by cargo plane to a new city. The ASPCA has rescued over 200,000 dogs by relocating them to new cities - and they aren't the only ones doing it.
posted by rednikki at 8:18 PM PST - 61 comments

Newly discovered paintings by Basquiat are going on display. But things may not be what they’re said to be. (archive.org link)
posted by PussKillian at 4:03 PM PST - 29 comments

Artist statements are difficult things to write. Maybe you hate writing them. Hate no more. Generate your own artist statement for free at the click of a button-->GENERATE SOME BOLLOCKS [more inside]
posted by youarenothere at 2:57 PM PST - 15 comments

Many cities in snowy climates have routines for keeping streets clear, typically shoving snow aside into piles that can grow and grow over the course of winter. Fewer cities have anything like Montréal’s well-choreographed snow removal operations (le déneigement), which clear sidewalks, bike paths, and streets by transporting and eliminating snow altogether.
posted by theory at 2:30 PM PST - 22 comments

Odekake Kozame, "Outing child shark", is a series of wonderful, gentle comics posted to Twitter by the psuedonymous Penguinbox, about a happy little shark who goes on various outings and activities in a Japanese town, whether that's going to an age-appropriate movie, running a race, enjoying illumination lights, winning an extra chilled pineapple, or making friends with the whack-a-mole-like snakes instead of hitting them. [more inside]
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:54 PM PST - 11 comments

Halfway through the third book of the Hitchhiker's Guide series, there is a throwaway reference to a doomed starship, one whose incredible splendor was matched only by the cosmic absurdity of its maiden-day annihilation. But the story didn't end there. Unbeknownst to many fans, this small piece of Adamsian lore was the inspiration for an ambitious and richly-detailed side-story: a 1998 computer adventure game called Starship Titanic. Designed by Douglas Adams himself, the game set players loose in the infamous vessel, challenging them with a maddening mystery laced with the devilish wit of the novels. The game was laden with extra content, including an in-depth strategy guide, a (mediocre) tie-in novel (and audiobook) by Terry Jones, a whimsical First Class In-Flight Magazine, and even a pair of 3D glasses for one of the more inventive puzzles. Key to solving these puzzles was the game's groundbreaking communications system -- players interacted with the ship's robotic crew through a natural language parsing engine called SpookiTalk, whose 10,000+ lines of conversational dialogue spawned 16 hours of audio recorded by professional voice actors, including John Cleese, Terry Jones, and even Douglas Adams himself in several cameos (spoiler cameo). Want to experience the voyage for yourself? Then pick up a $6 modernized copy of the game on Steam or GOG, watch this narrated video playthrough... or peruse this spectacular MetaFilter comment from developer Yoz Grahame, which touches on not just behind-the-scenes trivia and unknown easter eggs, but the most remarkable story of accidental online community you're ever going to hear. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 12:18 PM PST - 23 comments

Amazon's The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel [Fanfare] just debuted its fourth season, its first since late 2019! The 92nd Street Y got many of the cast members together for a conversation about the new season! [1h, Rachel Brosnahan, Tony Shalhoub, Marin Hinkle, Michale Zegen, Caroline Aaron, Luke Kirby]
posted by hippybear at 10:22 AM PST - 11 comments

Instead of using its platforms, which at times included both a morning and evening newspaper, to question and strike down racism, The Baltimore Sun frequently employed prejudice as a tool of the times. It fed the fear and anxiety of white readers with stereotypes and caricatures that reinforced their erroneous beliefs about Black Americans. The Editorial Board of the Baltimore Sun has published a lengthy apology for a long history of not only racial bias, but of publishing articles that further supported or enabled systemic racism. [more inside]
posted by Ghidorah at 7:34 AM PST - 7 comments

A cargo ship full of luxury automobiles is adrift in the ocean. Also it's on fire. [more inside]
posted by Tehhund at 6:31 AM PST - 74 comments

“You are meeting a guy who basically can tell you quite honestly my motive in doing what I did in my life was never to make a lot of money.” He grinned. “Ironically, I did what I wanted to do and I also made a lot of money.” A brief pause. “That's a joke.” from Francis Ford Coppola’s $100 Million Bet [GQ; Archive]
posted by chavenet at 5:14 AM PST - 9 comments

19th Feb is the 50th day of the year. If you forget to celebrate DarwinDay, you have a week to gird your loins for TinDay ₅₀Sn being the 50th element; but don't let it go to your head. Tin is one of the metals important for future technologies [MIFT] and the spot price has tripled during Coronarama; so we need to know something about it. [more inside]
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:42 PM PST - 16 comments

It was as if a “Seinfeld” plot met John le Carré. Kristin Zawatski, 44, who works in information technology, in a department of about 70 people, was helping to conduct a virtual job interview. She said she was impressed by the candidate’s sharp understanding of the technical skills required for the position. But about 15 minutes into the conversation, one of her colleagues muted the video call. “The person answering the questions isn’t the person on camera....." [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 8:29 PM PST - 131 comments

After their release (from) Psychedelic Concentration Camp, a live performance from Halloween 2013, The FORGER's youtube channel has been dormant. But at the end of 2021 they had Technical Difficulties, a live performance from New Year's Eve 2020 uploaded to their channel. The Forger (previously) is a collaboration between Meat Beat Manifesto's Jack Dangers and video artist Benjamin Stokes. (I felt that the brilliant, underviewed work of these two artists was worth a #DoublesJubilee post.)
posted by Catblack at 8:07 PM PST - 2 comments

Women's figure skating, usually promoted as the glittering highlight of the Winter Olympics, ended disastrously this year. The gold medallist said she felt empty. The silver medallist pledged never to skate again. The favourite left in tears without saying a word. The competitors knew that in a system where puberty is viewed with fear and suspicion, they will be discarded after one Games and "left with physical and psychological injuries that will take years to repair." [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 7:21 PM PST - 55 comments

“Could I actually define my risk of death if I got COVID? No, I really can’t. And that’s a hard thing to make peace with.” [more inside]
posted by MrVisible at 5:49 PM PST - 32 comments

No-knead Gatorade bread. Because it’s finally time for someone to be able to call bread refreshing.
posted by bondcliff at 4:30 PM PST - 28 comments

I naively started out thinking that Google Slides was just a poorly maintained product suffering from some questionable foundational decisions, but now, after having had to use it so much in the past year, I believe that Google Slides is actually just trolling me.
posted by rorgy at 4:22 PM PST - 27 comments

Bookstore Simulator - Based on a pen and paper RPG originally in a tweet from Henry Sotheran's, antiquarian bookseller.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 3:10 PM PST - 15 comments

Paris has announced [fr][en] a through-traffic-free zone in the city center, to begin in 2024. Delivery drivers, local traffic, people with disabilities, and emergency vehicles will still be able to enter the "tranquil zone". [more inside]
posted by threementholsandafuneral at 1:33 PM PST - 25 comments

Shasha is an independent streaming service for South-West Asian and North African cinema. [previously from latkes] | Voleflix is a collection of public domain film from MF's own malevolent, with lots of film noir and classic Hollywood highlights [previously from filthy light thief] | Means.tv is the world's first worker-owned streaming service, with a focus on leftist content [previously from TheWhelk] | The Korean Film Archive maintains a YouTube channel with more than 200 free-to-watch features (seven of Bong Joon-ho's favorites is as good a place to start as any) [previously from dancestoblue] | KinoCult offers free streaming of curated and genre film [previously from dobbs] | UbuWeb hosts thousands of avant-garde, rare, and out-of-print film and videos [previously from treepour] | Le Cinéma Club is a uniquely curated streaming platform screening one international short every week, for free. [previously from me]
posted by youarenothere at 12:18 PM PST - 6 comments

Unlike many cinematic exports, the Disney canon of films distinguishes itself with an impressive dedication to dubbing. Through an in-house service called Disney Character Voices International, not just dialogue but songs, too, are skillfully re-recorded, echoing the voice acting, rhythm, and rhyme scheme of the original work to an uncanny degree (while still leaving plenty of room for lyrical reinvention). The breadth of the effort is surprising, as well -- everything from Arabic to Icelandic to Zulu gets its own dub, and their latest project, Encanto, debuted in more than forty tongues (can you even name that many?). Luckily for polyglots everywhere, the exhaustiveness of Disney's translations is thoroughly documented online in multilanguage mixes and one-line comparisons, linguistic kaleidoscopes that cast new light on old standards. Highlights: "One Jump Ahead," "Prince Ali," and "A Whole New World" (Aladdin) - "Circle of Life," "Hakuna Matata," and "Luau!" (The Lion King) - "Part of Your World", "Under the Sea", and "Poor Unfortunate Souls" (The Little Mermaid) - "Belle" and "Tale as Old as Time" (Beauty and the Beast) - "Just Around the Riverbend" and "Colors of the Wind" (Pocahontas) - "One Song" and "Heigh-Ho" (Snow White) - "When You Wish Upon a Star" (Pinocchio) - "When She Loved Me" (Toy Story 2) - "Let It Go" (Frozen) - "How Far I'll Go" and "You're Welcome" (Moana) - "Remember Me" (Coco) - "We Don't Talk About Bruno" (Encanto) - Disney Classics, Princesses, Heroes, and Villains in their native languages
posted by Rhaomi at 12:15 PM PST - 21 comments

What animals are thinking and feeling and why it should matter [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 12:14 PM PST - 8 comments

For my #DoublesJubilee contribution, I bring up Prisencolinensinainciusol, a song by an Italian singer-songwriter, actor, film director, musician, and dancer Adriano Celentano, is not in Italian. It is not in English. It is fake gibberish that sounds like English to Italians. I also found some other old posts. [more inside]
posted by AlSweigart at 10:27 AM PST - 48 comments

How a once fringe idea — making it safe to get high — became a reality. [more inside]
posted by praemunire at 9:26 AM PST - 26 comments

The Soviets went to extraordinary lengths to cultivate citrus fruits on their largely unsuitable territory. The techniques they used included breeding varieties more resistant to cold (in part by gradually moving each generation farther north). They also bred very short (25cm tall) trees that spread out very broadly. Oh, and they planted trees in trenches up to 2 meters deep. As you do. [more inside]
posted by fruitslinger at 8:50 AM PST - 22 comments

So you've played the original, and the dirty version, and the version in your language, what could you possibly be missing? SQUARDLE! takes you to the next dimension. [more inside]
posted by J.R. Hartley at 5:36 AM PST - 40 comments

From his home in Normandy, the eighty-four-year-old artist shows off a new series of portrait paintings and discusses all of the work he still has left to do. David Hockney Rediscovers Painting [The New Yorker; Archive]
posted by chavenet at 1:17 AM PST - 11 comments

A new paper in PLOS "came out of a lot of discussion between all of the authors about why the broad majority of infectious disease transmission models have not typically treated equity – the distribution of who gets infected as a function of wealth, race/ethnicity, gender, and on – as a first-class concern alongside population-level patterns of incidence and mortality." Conference talk.
posted by clawsoon at 7:00 PM PST - 17 comments

Vampire Survivors is a free “bullet-hell roguelike” game where you walk around endless crowds of monsters, randomly firing bullets into them, while trying to survive. It doesn’t require no skills, but it also doesn’t require all your attention and is free and fun.
A Polygon review of the $3 Steam version.
posted by Going To Maine at 7:00 PM PST - 60 comments

The Interstate's Forgotten Code(slyt)
posted by bondcliff at 3:56 PM PST - 84 comments

We’ve talked about Graham’s Number previously, most recently after Ron Graham’s death in 2020. Numberphile has several great videos about it: Graham’s Number; What is Graham’s Number? (featuring Ron Graham); How Big is Graham’s Number? (featuring Ron Graham). But we’re just getting started. The number TREE(3), which comes from a simple combinatorial problem in graph theory, is proven to be finite, but unimaginably larger than the already unimaginable Graham’s Number. Tony Padilla explains further in these Numberphile videos: The Enormous TREE(3); TREE(3) (extra footage); TREE vs Graham’s Number; TREE(Graham’s Number) (extra). There is an endless supply of even larger numbers defined by fast-growing computable sequences, but things get wilder in the realm of uncomputable numbers. The Busy Beaver function, related to the maximum number of steps taken by a halting Turing machine with a given number of states, provably grows faster than any computable function. David Brailsford explains in the Computerphile video Busy Beaver Turing Machines. And Rayo’s Number is “one of the largest named numbers in professional mathematics.” Tony Padilla is back to explain in The Daddy of Big Numbers (Rayo’s Number). [more inside]
posted by mubba at 1:43 PM PST - 24 comments

More than forty years ago, folklorist Alvin Schwartz published Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, the first of three horror anthologies that would go on to become the single most challenged book series of the 1990s. But most of the backlash was against not the stories themselves (which were fairly tame), but rather the illustrations of artist Stephen Gammell, whose bizarre, grotesque, nightmarish black-and-white inkscapes suffused every page with an eerie, unsettling menace. While the books were briefly re-issued in 2010 with new, milder illustrations by Brett Helquist of A Series of Unfortunate Events fame, the outcry was so great that the move was reversed a few years later. Gammell's dark vision would go on to inspire several monsters in the respectable 2019 film adaptation produced by Guillermo del Toro (with a sequel on the way). But for purists, the original art is available for your viewing pleasure: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones. Interested in revisiting the stories themselves? Then don't miss the dramatic readings of YouTuber daMeatHook, or the official audiobook(s) narrated by Patton Oswalt, Melissa McBride, and Alex Brightman. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 12:14 PM PST - 22 comments

Board game writer Dan Thurot offers a meditation on identity, 9/11, H.P. Lovecraft, and several board game adaptations that deal with these.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 10:04 AM PST - 10 comments

This Place Was Home, a Boba Fett fan comic by ND Stevenson. [more inside]
posted by Katemonkey at 9:55 AM PST - 11 comments

A bracing post from 2019 by Sarah Miller: The sea level in Miami has risen ten inches since 1900; in the 2000 years prior, it did not really change. The consensus among informed observers is that the sea will rise in Miami Beach somewhere between 13 and 34 inches by 2050. By 2100, it is extremely likely to be closer to six feet, which means, unless you own a yacht and a helicopter, sayonara. Sunset Harbour is expected to fare slightly worse, and to do so more quickly. Thus, I felt the Sunset Harbour area was a good place to start pretending to buy a home here. Amazingly, in the face of these incontrovertible facts about the climate the business of luxury real estate is chugging along just fine, and I wanted to see the cognitive dissonance up close.
posted by Bella Donna at 9:50 AM PST - 33 comments

CDI was born in the late 1980s when a group of male crossdressers, tired of being harassed in public, placed an ad in the back of The Village Voice directing other male crossdressers to meet in hotel suites around the city where they could lift gender boundaries and safely dress femme. Eventually, the club grew and moved its meetings to a member’s apartment next to Port Authority where they answered questions and gave advice on hotlines connected to the ads. They moved to their current Hell’s Kitchen clubhouse six years ago. [more inside]
posted by praemunire at 8:50 AM PST - 7 comments

Back in 2016, Swedish musician/composer Martin Molin of the band Wintergatan debuted a new video for a song titled Marble Machine, utilizing 2000 marbles running through a flywheel + drops mechanism of Molin's design, creating a kind of bespoke homemade backing band for the song. It went pretty viral. [more inside]
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 1:24 PM PST - 50 comments

In 2020, rising pedestrian deaths were blamed on fewer cars on the road due to the pandemic. However, with car traffic nearly returning to pre-pandemic levels, pedestrian deaths continue to rise in the US, now blamed on reckless driving. Vox and Strong Towns offer alternative but more complicated explanations.
posted by meowzilla at 1:08 PM PST - 87 comments

It's a simple concept: Given a choice between two random movies, which one do you like best? That's the driving force behind Flickchart, an addictive review site for movie lovers. Faced with two posters, click the one for the title you prefer (weeding out the ones you haven't seen). Good! Now do it again. And again. And again. With each new face-off, Flickchart perfects a growing list of your favorite films -- and there can be no ties. This leads to some difficult dilemmas: Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark? Citizen Kane or The Godfather? WALL-E or Spirited Away? But you needn't struggle alone -- Flickchart is also social. By drawing on the data of tens of thousands of fellow users, you can create remarkably specific lists: Martin Scorsese's Best Period Films. The Best Road Movies of the 1980s. The Worst Movies of All Time. If you rank enough films, you can generate interesting personalized charts, like "Your Favorite Musicals" or "The Best Movies You Haven't Seen." These filters carry over to the ranking system, letting you judge nothing but Horror movies or 1960s movies or unranked movies or movies from your top 100. You can also comment on popular match-ups, lending your voice to contentious debates like Ghostbusters vs. Back to the Future or Jaws vs. Predator. Not a movie fan? Don't worry. Flickchart will be expanding into books, games, and music soon at some point. Until then, you can give your own data sets the Flickchart treatment using this tool from Gwern Branwen. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 12:06 PM PST - 43 comments

Stitching together of two separate interviews from 8-9 years apart! [alternate link] Here is Tavi Gevinson's link to the now sadly defunct Rookie Magazine. I was wondering what was up with Ms. Gevinson after she closed the magazine. looks like she has transitioned into being a Broadway Actress. EXTRA: Here is her article on singing Sondheim songs on Broadway [alternate link].
posted by indianbadger1 at 11:47 AM PST - 6 comments

Back when politicians were referring to the "Information Super Highway there was USENET where a great deal of information was exchanged. Norman Yarvin curated some of that infomation on topics such as Air Conditioning, Bicycles, Cars, Chemistry, Computers, Explosives & Pyrotechnics, Food, Metalworking, Telephones, Physics, Space and many more. He published them into the Yarchive {main index link} where it has been available ever since. [more inside]
posted by Mitheral at 11:18 AM PST - 38 comments

A Vibe Shift Is Coming. Will any of us survive it? "A vibe shift is the catchy but sort of too-cool term Monahan uses for a relatively simple idea: In the culture, sometimes things change, and a once-dominant social wavelength starts to feel dated. Monahan, who is 35, breaks down the three vibe shifts he has survived and observed: Hipster/Indie Music (ca. 2003–9), or peak Arcade Fire, Bloc Party, high-waisted Cheap Mondays, Williamsburg, bespoke-cocktail bars; Post-Internet/Techno Revival (ca. 2010–16), or the Blood Orange era, normcore, dressing like The Matrix, Kinfolk the club, not Kinfolk the magazine; and Hypebeast/Woke (ca. 2016–20), or Drake at his Drakest, the Nike SNKRS app, sneaker flipping, virtue signaling, Donald Trump, protests not brunch."
posted by gwint at 11:15 AM PST - 143 comments

Would you let a robot give you a tattoo? You might change your mind after you see what the prototype does to a tomato at 1:32. Cringeworthy for anyone with empathy and skin. [more inside]
posted by drdanger at 10:07 AM PST - 33 comments

An amusing description of the increasingly convoluted scheme to deliver bitcoins to striking truckers. Via web3 is going great.
posted by signal at 9:50 AM PST - 61 comments

Bob Leverett "comes across like something between an old Southern senator and an itinerant preacher, ready to filibuster or sermonize at a moment’s notice. Invariably, the topic of these sermons is the importance of old-growth forest, not only for its serene effect on the human soul or for its biodiversity, but for its vital role in mitigating climate change.“ [more inside]
posted by drlith at 8:51 AM PST - 7 comments

Stephanie Selby of Cody, Wyoming, died on February 3. In her childhood, she starred in Balanchine's Nutcracker in New York City and featured in the 1976 book A Very Young Dancer, one of a series of photo books for child readers (including A Very Young Gymnast and A Very Young Rider). Fame and fan mail followed, as the book inspired thousands of other children, but when Selby was thirteen, her ballet career came to an end. Afterwards, she struggled with depression and drifted between jobs, but eventually found herself working with animals and settling in the countryside in the West, where a reporter found her again in 2011 (previously).
(cw: suicide)
posted by Countess Elena at 7:24 AM PST - 16 comments

If math is the art of finding relations between abstract objects, then a catalogue of abstract objects is a good place for a mathematician to start. So: real numbers (in order of popularity), equations, functions, formulas involving π, tilings (previously, specifically nonperiodic), rings and their properties, finite group representations, packings of equal circles in a square, triangle centers (previously), top ten lists of prime numbers, integer sequences (previously, extremely previously), combinatorial statistics, graphs, movies, fundamental theorems, counterexamples.
posted by warpy at 5:53 AM PST - 21 comments

The original reel-to-reel audio and transcripts of civil rights activists interviewed by Robert Penn Warren for Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965) were made available by Vanderbilt University as part of a wider archive of letters, images, and other supporting materials. Hear Robert Moses (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), Bayard Rustin (Freedom Rides, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, March on Washington), Septima Poinsette Clark (Highlander Folk School, Citizenship Schools), Malcolm X, Whitney Young (Urban League), students from Jackson State and Tougaloo Colleges, James Baldwin and more on justice, activism, movement-building, revolution, and freedom. [more inside]
posted by youarenothere at 5:38 AM PST - 3 comments

Entertainment Made By Cults is a tight hour of all kinds of things you'd expect to encounter, and a lot of stuff you didn't. It's a fascinating glimpse into the creativity of the fringe, certainly worth a bit of time.
posted by hippybear at 8:41 PM PST - 8 comments

(cw: assault, racial violence) Early Sunday, Christina Yuna Lee, a 35 year-old Korean American woman living in NYC, was followed into her apartment and stabbed to death. [more inside]
posted by paimapi at 8:31 PM PST - 22 comments

'Flat Hatting' [more inside]
posted by clavdivs at 7:53 PM PST - 16 comments

San Francisco Police enjoys putting rape victim's DNA into crime search databases San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin has made a press release denouncing the SFPD for their abuse of DNA evidence collected in sexual assaults, which has been used to attempt to incriminate rape victims. I have no words for this perfidy, except to say defund the police. I'd call this a new low, but given the past history of the SFPD....
posted by LeRoienJaune at 7:19 PM PST - 20 comments

The Drone Abides: Bagpipes in Experimental Music (SL Bandcamp with a writeup and plenty of links).
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 5:45 PM PST - 12 comments

It's not a double, but the videos are a few months old so I'm using that as an excuse to post Strong Bad playing old DOS games! So far, there's FriendlyWare, FriendlyWare update, and World Games.
posted by JHarris at 5:02 PM PST - 8 comments

For the past year or so, [sdomi had] been thinking about writing a Minecraft server in Bash as a thought excercise. 2600 words plus code plus images describing the effort.
posted by cgc373 at 4:01 PM PST - 19 comments

"Giving money and power to politicians is a lot like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys..."
posted by dfm500 at 3:15 PM PST - 78 comments

Argus implants promised vision to a small group of patients, but now that the company has gone silent, no one knows what to do. At least one patient resorted to cannibalizing spare parts, but things clearly can't last.
posted by Alensin at 2:03 PM PST - 20 comments

Title ideas for my science fiction novel. Something more mysterious or something less obvious. Lewis Hackett (Twitter) uses several applications to help him create new paperback covers of 1970s science fiction. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 12:53 PM PST - 6 comments

From 2005 to 2014, eyelevel10585 would find old cameras with undeveloped film, do his best to develop it, and post the pictures on the internet. #DoublesJubilee
posted by Quonab at 12:11 PM PST - 11 comments

Snippets of poetry from the Imperium; a sample folk tale from the Oral History; brief biographies of over a dozen Duncan Idahos; two differing approaches to Paul Muad'Dib himself and to his son Leto II; Fremen recipes; Fremen history; secrets of the Bene Gesserit; the songs of Gurney Halleck -- these are just some of the treasures found when an earthmover fell into the God Emperor's no-room at Dar-es-Balat. Out of print for more than three decades, disavowed by Frank Herbert's estate, and highly sought-after by fans, the legendary Dune Encyclopedia is now available on Archive.org as a fully illustrated and searchable PDF. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 12:04 PM PST - 18 comments

"When anonymous hackers infiltrated the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex in 2016, it shook the nascent world of digital currency and prompted speculation about who might have stolen what was [alternate link] then $71 million in Bitcoin. But unlike traditional financial transactions, Bitcoin trades are publicly visible — moving the coins risked revealing who was behind the heist. And so for six years, as the value of Bitcoin soared, the loot sat in plain sight online as tiny fractions of the giant sum occasionally disappeared in a blizzard of complex transactions. It was as if a robber’s getaway car was permanently parked outside the bank, locked tight, money still inside. And then, this month, the car sped off."
posted by 47WaysToLeaveYourLover at 9:53 AM PST - 56 comments

The ‘dreaded disease’ that claimed 1.5 million looks a lot like COVID-19, including the long-term threat posed by ‘viral promiscuity.’ Andrew Nikiforuk TheTyee.ca
posted by bq at 8:54 AM PST - 18 comments

"The adorable love story behind Wikipedia’s ‘high five’ photos", by Annie Rauwerda for Input. The ending is cute!
posted by brainwane at 8:31 AM PST - 24 comments

Michael Hobbes, journalist and Maintenance Phase co-host (also ex-You're Wrong About), wants to ask: "Is "Cancel Culture" Really a Threat To America?" [more inside]
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 6:46 AM PST - 34 comments

The Toronto Star reports on the many varied impressions of the convoy worldwide

Politico writes that there are fears that the protests are galvanizing the Right worldwide

Bill Maher pipes up that Truckers "Not Wrong" To Be "Pissed Off" at The Elites Corrupting The System, Trudeau Sounds Like Hitler.

The New York Times reports that leaked data shows Canadians are responsible for roughly half the money raised online for the trucker convoy.

If that's the case, the BBC wants to talk about Trudeau's strategy: Why is he taking such a hard line?

EuracTIF reports on Brussels and Paris pre-emptively banning similar convoys.

[more inside]
posted by Violet Blue at 4:14 AM PST - 677 comments

Tod Browning's 1932 cinematic masterpiece Freaks (video: Part 1 - Part 2) tells the story of a close-knit group of circus sideshow workers who are wronged and take revenge. The film's use of real-life freaks so disturbed audiences that some ran screaming from theaters, distributors refused to handle the film, and it was banned in Britain for over 30 years. [more inside]
posted by flug at 9:11 PM PST - 19 comments

What happens to all the stuff after a World's Fair? It's a question I hadn't really asked myself before, but After The Fair: The Legacy Of The 1964-65 NY World's Fair [1h41m] is a documentary (apparently from 2020) that gives a brief history of that famous World's Fair and then details what happened to various pavilions, entertainments, and other bits since the Fair closed. Delightful and informative in ways I was neither asking for nor expecting, If you like this kind of thing, you will LIKE this one.
posted by hippybear at 8:29 PM PST - 10 comments

King Louie deserves a tribute
posted by hairless ape at 7:15 PM PST - 6 comments

"On August 2, 1909, Mr. Edwin A. Grozier, Publisher of the Boston Post, a newspaper, forwarded to the Board of Selectmen in 700 towns (in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Maine) in New England a gold-headed ebony cane with the request that it be presented with the compliments of the Boston Post to the oldest male citizen of the town, to be used by him as long as he lives... and at his death handed down to the next oldest citizen of the town. The cane would belong to the town and not the man who received it." While eligibility has, since 1930, been extended to women, and in some towns the cane is not presented to but merely named for the town's oldest citizen, this tradition still continues today. One website (slightly out of date) attempts to track who's name is on the cane in each participating town. While not every town is still keeping good track of the location of the cane or the age of its oldest resident, many do. Stow MA, Bethlehem NH, Sunderland MA, Foster, RI, and aptly, Livermore ME and Gray, ME.
posted by jessamyn at 4:17 PM PST - 17 comments

And here again are Norah, Yarah and Rosa:

Professor Longhair -- Big Chief Blues (Pt. 2)

2Pac -- Only God Can Judge Me

Common ft. Blackthought, Seun Kuti -- When We Move

aka Let It Happen

So enjoy and as you know... [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 1:25 PM PST - 12 comments

Trick to Keep Your Home Warm During Winter.
posted by storybored at 12:38 PM PST - 39 comments

Nearly a dozen years since the series finale of Lost, the intricate story might seem a little hazy in retrospect. One could always refresh with Lostpedia, sardonic animations, or high-speed costumed re-enactments. Or for longtime fans, why not reminisce by revisiting the show's infamous bookends -- the artfully inscrutable scenes which introduce or conclude each season (plus a few other key scenes)? S1: Pilot - The Monster - Walkabout - Sawyer's letter - Jin and Sun - Parting Words - Exodus - S2: Make Your Own Kind of Music - Rose and Bernard - The Button - S3: Downtown - Hurley's Van - Charlie - We Have to Go Back - S4: Oceanic Six - The Constant - Alex - The Coffin - S5: Mineshaft - Jacob and the Man in Black - What About Me? - S6: Sideways - Underwater - The Submarine - Final Battle - Moving On - The End - Epilogue. Or settle in and watch this 3-hour retrospective labor of love. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 12:00 PM PST - 69 comments

This is your decadal reminder that the Lomax Collection exists. It includes hundreds of hours of recordings of 20th century American folk music, and some other neat things. This is a doubles jubillee repost of zarq's lovely 2012 post. (The broken "Now, nearly ten years..." link is replaced by the first link here. Everything else still works.)
posted by eotvos at 11:23 AM PST - 1 comment

Ever wondered just what the townspeople of Pelican Town think of you, the Farmer, when you do some absolutely weird nonsense like sell a single raw fish or know every single thing about them courtesy of the Stardew Valley Wiki? If so, Youtubers Matthew McCleskey and UnsurpassableZ have the hilarious rotoscope animations for you! [more inside]
posted by yasaman at 11:22 AM PST - 5 comments

Lists of overlooked and underrated composers.
posted by Iridic at 10:27 AM PST - 24 comments

Prince Charles and Duchess Camilla come down with covid after mingling mask-free with the public. Prince Charles has tested positive for covid a second time, the day after going maskless at a public event. After first testing negative, Duchess Camilla went out maskless to another public event, and then of course got diagnosed as positive right after that. And yes, the Queen did see Charles recently, whyever do you ask? The Palace so far declines to say if she's been tested or what the results are, or even if she got a booster. They just claim she doesn't have symptoms. [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:24 AM PST - 41 comments

Roses are red
MeFi is blue
Here's a Free Thread
Full of poems for u
posted by cortex at 8:34 AM PST - 189 comments

"Alright my darlings, it’s time. Time for this next installment of Unhinged Victorian Greeting Cards: VALENTINE’S DAY EDITION. ❤️ Let’s start with some tamer ones. Previously featured fish and leek / Cannibal cottage / LOBSTER / Sentient boots (ft. straw and coins)" (Twitter thread, images courtesy of museum of London archives) [more inside]
posted by slimepuppy at 7:29 AM PST - 12 comments

"King's Quest III remains the least explored speedrun of the main series. And there are several, very good reasons for why that is."
posted by simmering octagon at 6:16 AM PST - 16 comments

Flash is dead, or is it? Ruffle is an alternate way to run Flash content! It's written in Rust, a language designed for memory safety, so it's much safer than Flash was. It's available as a standalone application, or a browser extension (compiled it to WebAssembly). You can even use it to run Flash apps on iOS. If you want to test it out, you could have another go at Dungeon Robber (Doubles Jubilee, 2013), a simulation of dungeon exploration using the rules from the 1st Edition AD&D DM's Guide.
posted by JHarris at 2:39 AM PST - 14 comments

Are you aware MF's own waxpancake/Andy Baio & jake made a track-by-track 8-bit reinterpretation of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue? [more inside]
posted by youarenothere at 12:44 AM PST - 11 comments

Since we're doing Doubles Jubilee, I finally get to post my discovery of the re-upload of RPG Hell/The Crawl (previously), the queer actual-play tabletop RPG podcast about the post-apocalypse, furries, interdimensional weirdness, and a close-knit community occupying a space they didn't originally build. [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 7:09 PM PST - 3 comments

The idea driving the experiment was simple: if you feed them, they will come. In this case, “they” were the scavengers that float, swim, burrow, and crawl in the muck at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. These scavengers can’t live without food, but because plants and phytoplankton cannot grow in the deepest ocean where there is no light, biologists believe that the organisms found there largely subsist on “food falls” that drift down in the form of kelp or dead fish and other animals. McClain suspected that decomposing alligators might play a role in feeding the invertebrates that dwell at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Understanding the fate of dead creatures—like alligators—on the seafloor would help to fill gaps in knowledge about both the food chain and the carbon cycle in the ocean depths.
posted by ShooBoo at 5:47 PM PST - 19 comments

Five years before Toy Story proved to the world that pure CGI -- a field long relegated to the role of special effects -- could be an art form in its own right, Odyssey Productions attempted to do the same on a slightly smaller scale. Drawing on the demo reels, commercials, music videos, and feature films of over 300 digital animators, the studio collated dozens of beautiful* and cutting-edge clips** into an ambitious 40-minute art film called The Mind's Eye. Backed by an eclectic mix of custom-written electronic, classical, oriental, and tribal music, the surreal, dreamlike imagery formed a rough narrative in eight short segments that illustrated the evolution of life, technology, and human society: Creation - Civilization Rising - Heart of the Machine - Technodance - Post Modern - Love Found - Leaving the Bonds of Earth - The Temple - End credits (including names and sources for all clips used). It was the beginning of a groundbreaking and influential audiovisual series -- all of which has been lovingly preserved by digital archivists decades after the fact. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 11:55 AM PST - 27 comments

In January one of Jay Rayner's Observer reviews included a short news bite on a crowdfund to help a small London restaurant, Sugarcane, get back on its feet after a break in. This week, Jay reviewed the restaurant and seems to have caused an outbreak of emotion amongst readers. [more inside]
posted by ElasticParrot at 11:05 AM PST - 12 comments

Complete History Of The Soviet Union, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris. SLYT, re-upping these three posts for Doubles Jubilee.
posted by one for the books at 11:01 AM PST - 6 comments

"Earlier I somehow found myself in a bizarre liminal space, relaying the adventure to my friends in a group chat as it happened. Please enjoy photos from this insanity." Twitter thread, threadreader
posted by rebent at 8:11 AM PST - 53 comments

"It started with wondering through hallways in confusion before finding myself in this large room, expecting to find an exit on the other end. Instead, I found a bench and a locked door. At this point I texted my group chat. After laughing at me they recommended looking around." - William Yearout's Twitter thread about visiting a banal liminal space with 100% bad vibes.
posted by fight or flight at 8:08 AM PST - 97 comments

After discovering six adopted brothers and sisters, these siblings believe their story is more than a sprawling family secret The last infant came and went when Bob was 9, and soon his memories of the transient babies faded. It wasn’t until decades later, when he sent a tube of spit to Ancestry, that he would be confronted with undeniable truths about his upbringing and his family. Not pay-wall version. Content warning: Child trafficking [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 2:21 AM PST - 30 comments

Dubbed one of the ugliest buildings in Britain, the Tricorn centre in Portsmouth was a 1960s Brutalist structure intended to house shops, parking facilities and flats but was poorly maintained from the outset. Demolished in 2004, it lives on on Youtube. Here urban explorers in 1989 investigate its abandoned nightclub; here's a 6m documentary piece with different views of the structure, plus comments from the architects and a digital artist inspired by it; and finally a compilation of slightly-repetitive local news coverage on the day demolition started
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 11:22 PM PST - 30 comments

Remember zefrank? Metafilter remembers! What's on Your HappyList? [OG post by holmesian] | How to Dance Properly [OG post via Dirjy] | i am interested in a particular memory: the uncomfortable moment when you first see your parent as being weak...being human. could you describe that moment? [OG post by muthecow (comments kinda weird fyi)] | social network for two (and other songs) [OG posts from rageagainsttherobots & Sticherbeast] [more inside]
posted by youarenothere at 10:34 PM PST - 22 comments

Occasionally, we all just need a good slap. In the face. With an eel. [more inside]
posted by slater at 6:46 PM PST - 12 comments

If you’ve seen new construction around your city, you’ve probably seen these distinctive rectangular panels. Sometimes plain, sometimes multi-colored, they’re absolutely everywhere. This video explains how they conceal an entire system that helps protect buildings.
posted by ShooBoo at 3:50 PM PST - 30 comments

Almost Everything by Kirby Ferguson was a web series featuring a good-natured Canadian geek who used slick, fast-paced video presentations to comment on the world's ills. Highlights: Trajan is the Movie Font - Slumdog Controversy - Talent is Hard Work. Ferguson would soon perfect his craft with the sprawling pop-cultural project Everything is a Remix [website - transcripts] -- described in a 2011 Atlantic interview as a "sweeping, four-part series asserting that all creative work is a recombination and transformation of existing elements" that is "as much a philosophical odyssey as a documentary series" -- as well as This is Not a Conspiracy Theory, "a documentary about where conspiracy theories come from, what they reveal about all of us, and the real quest to discover the hidden forces that shape our lives." [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 11:49 AM PST - 11 comments

I wouldn't consider myself a metal head. I had not, previously, been in the habit of intentionally searching out metal covers. So I'm not entirely sure why, a couple weeks ago, YouTube's algorithm decided to suggest Norwegian musician and music producer Leo Moracchioli's cover of Toto's Africa or what, exactly, made me click on it. But I can't say that I'm sorry I did. I've been diving down the rabbit hole since and, if you'd like to join me, there's plenty [more inside]
posted by Mister_Sleight_of_Hand at 7:43 AM PST - 30 comments

Yesterday evening, the Cole County, Missouri prosecutor declined to file charges against Josh Renaud, a journalist from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who discovered a flaw in a state website exposing private information and ethically disclosed the vulnerability to the state before the paper published its story. Renaud's statement begins: "This decision is a relief. But it does not repair the harm done to me and my family. My actions were entirely legal and consistent with established journalistic principles." [more inside]
posted by brentajones at 7:35 AM PST - 20 comments

Rescued baby echidna in Sydney grows healthy under vet's care. – A rescued echidna puggle has been nursed back to health under the care of a vet who has taken up the role as its "mother," a Sydney zoo says. Five-month-old echidna Weja was rescued in October, and nurse Liz McConnell had been taking care of it at her home non-stop until earlier this month when the baby spent its first night in the hospital, a milestone in the rehabilitation process., AFP News Agency, Feb 11, 2022.
posted by cenoxo at 5:35 AM PST - 14 comments

January 5, 2017, a few weeks before the release of her first novel...
[I]n the middle of so many discussions of the causes of this year’s events (economics, backlash, media, the not-so-sleeping dragon bigotry), and of how to respond to them (petitions, debate, fundraising, art, despair) I hope people will find it useful to zoom out with me, to talk about the causes of historical events and change in general. Historian Ada Palmer writes about the history of the idea of progress, the role of individuals in history, the (simulated) Papal election of 2016, and what it all means for us here in 2017. [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 11:26 PM PST - 3 comments

Wordle-Like Games Slowly Gain Traction on Chinese Social Media
posted by otherchaz at 11:09 PM PST - 4 comments

The decline of war in human history is now at stake The decline of war didn’t result from a divine miracle or from a change in the laws of nature. It resulted from humans making better choices. It is arguably the greatest political and moral achievement of modern civilisation. Unfortunately, the fact that it stems from human choice also means that it is reversible. [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 3:35 PM PST - 127 comments

Recently searching for ways to pave a large courtyard* (with in-situ recycled concrete) my hits included a metafilter favourite New Pentagons (all links still work) I got so into reading the replies, I had to add a comment myself ... until re-realising it was a 2015 post from metroid baby [account disabled ] [Part of #DoublesJubilee month!] [more inside]
posted by unearthed at 1:28 PM PST - 3 comments

Why do online recipes so often start with long narratives despite frequent criticism of the practice? For one, because it works. Bloggers want you to stop shaming recipe bloggers for writing a lot. One tool that allowed users to easily scrape recipes was taken offline after a backlash from bloggers. Even Mindy Kaling took some heat for her criticism. And it doesn't stop at traditional blogs - FoodTok creators like The Korean Vegan share their food with a large helping of stories, as well.
posted by mosst at 12:59 PM PST - 237 comments

Ten minutes of deep-sea animals and ambient tunes from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI)
posted by Going To Maine at 12:53 PM PST - 9 comments

Hundreds of feet below the ground in Missouri, deep in converted limestone mines, caves kept perfectly at 36 degrees Fahrenheit store stockpiles of government-owned cheese comprising the country’s 1.4 billion pounds of surplus cheese. How we got to this point is a long story... [more inside]
posted by rikschell at 12:45 PM PST - 69 comments

Darwinday tomorrow. On the conservation front let's make a pitch for minority species to take some of the attention from King Kongservation species like rhinos (Rhinoceros unicornis) and tigers (Panthera tigris). Presenting Hargila greater adjutant stork (Leptoptilos dubius). [more inside]
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:42 PM PST - 5 comments

Squabble has you guess 5-letter words in real time as your health meter ticks away, while as many as 99 other people try to guess the same words. You can also set up smaller games of up to 6 people to play against friends. Other people guessing words occasionally hurts your health, but there's no way to intentionally interact with your opponents.
posted by one for the books at 12:03 PM PST - 20 comments

Circa 2010, after David Letterman signed off and the Worldwide Pants production logo faded, viewing audiences were oftentimes treated to a cold open of an empty talk show set... one that quickly became the impromptu dance floor for a shameless Scot making an absolute giddy fool of himself while lip-syncing pop songs alongside a menagerie of puppets (and a couple of scantily-costumed stagehands). Preserved on YouTube for your viewing pleasure, the complete collection of Craig Ferguson's Late Late Show musical numbers: "Say Hey (I Love You)" [Michael Franti & Spearhead] - "White Lines" [Duran Duran] - "Wonderful Night" [Fatboy Slim] - "Istanbul" [They Might Be Giants] - "Oops!...I Did It Again" [Britney Spears] - "MMMBop" [Hanson] - "In the Navy" [Village People] - "Fireball" [Don Spencer] - "I'm Yours" [Jason Mraz] - "The Lonely Goatherd" [The Sound of Music] - "She Taught Me How To Yodel" [ Frank Ifield] - "Fire!" [Arthur Brown] - "Monster Mash" [Boris Pickett] - "Over At the Frankenstein Place" [Rocky Horror Picture Show] - "I Melt with You" [Modern English] - "Addicted to Love" [Robert Palmer] - "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk" [Trace Adkins] - "Ça Plane Pour Moi" [Plastic Bertrand] - "Scottish Rite Temple Stomp" [Ninian Hawick] - "Look Out, There's a Monster Coming" [Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band] - "Chant of the Wanderer" [Sons of the Pioneers] - "Take Your Tongue Out of My Mouth" [Jeff Daniels] - "You've Got a Friend" [James Taylor] - "Dracula's Lament" [Jason Segel] - "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head" - The lost "Dr. Who" cold open - The show's full theme song, "Tomorrow's Just Your Future Yesterday" - The spectacular farewell number: "Bang Your Drum" [Dead Man Fall] [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 11:48 AM PST - 52 comments

Rohan Chakravarty's "Green Humour" conservation comics include wry observations about bird names and bug-watchers, life lessons from leeches, a heartfelt thank you, and a review of the film Sherni from a tigress. The comics will also teach you about the binturong, sunbear, water strider, and pyjama shark among many other creatures small and large.
posted by spamandkimchi at 11:01 AM PST - 3 comments

The Washington Post on the EARN IT Act: "Under the Earn It Act, tech companies would lose some long-standing protections they enjoy under a legal shield called Section 230, opening them up to more lawsuits over posts of child sexual abuse material on their platforms. The bill, which was first introduced in 2020, would also create a national commission of law enforcement, abuse survivors and industry experts to develop best practices to address child abuse online." But the EFF is not a fan: [more inside]
posted by pelvicsorcery at 10:46 AM PST - 23 comments

Photographer Freddy Fabris recreates Renaissance paintings...but with auto mechanics.
posted by Kitteh at 10:41 AM PST - 11 comments

Her dad died. So her favorite NFL star took her to the father-daughter dance. Philadelphia Eagles player Anthony Harris flew across the country to escort his 11-year-old fan to the event. (Washington Post link, archive link here.)
posted by JanetLand at 10:24 AM PST - 8 comments

Bypasses most paywalls by delivering a cached google version
posted by beesbees at 9:03 AM PST - 22 comments

Following a week of revelations showing alarming hostility to trans rights within the UK's Equality and Human Rights Commission, a coalition of LGBTQ+ charities and human rights bodies have written to the United Nations to call for a Special Review of the ‘A’ status of EHRC as Great Britain’s National Human Rights Institution. [more inside]
posted by death valley compound at 6:28 AM PST - 21 comments

Four year old girl snowboarding while wearing a dinosaur costume and narrating her journey (single-link tiktok video).
posted by Kattullus at 4:47 AM PST - 38 comments

The human brain, rather than analysing the world as a series of snapshots, perceives any given moment as the average of what we saw in the past 15 seconds. That means that, in effect, your brain is a like a time machine, living 'in the past' to allow it perceive a stable environment and handle everyday life. The Conversation, via a subscriber only Future Crunch newsletter. Full research article (no paywall).
posted by ellieBOA at 4:08 AM PST - 42 comments

Last year here, someone mentioned music rights likely have kept the (*cough*) seminal 1990 movie off the internet, something confirmed by Christian Slater in 2020. Out of nowhere, apparently with zero fanfare, HBO Max added it earlier this month. Now you can stop watching that standard-definition version from the Internet Archive (although, you know, doing it that way might be more thematically appropriate?) [more inside]
posted by bixfrankonis at 10:13 PM PST - 53 comments

Bad Gear is a YouTube channel by AudioPilz that repeatedly tries to determine- is it the gear that is bad, or just the musician? Spoiler alert: it’s usually the musician. [more inside]
posted by q*ben at 7:46 PM PST - 14 comments

It's a bit late (and not quite as "official" as the last time around), but as we approach Super Bowl LVI, why not consider revisiting some of the best non-Super Bowl commercials of the 2010s: The Man Your Man Could Smell Like [Old Spice] - Ship My Pants [Kmart] - Love Has No Labels [Ad Council] - One Second per Day [Save the Children] - Lamp 2 [IKEA] - Back to School Essentials [Sandy Hook Promise] - Embrace Life [Sussex Safer Roads] - A Boy and His Duck [Iams] - Dumb Ways to Die [Melbourne Metro] - The Truth is Worth It [NYTimes] - Like A Girl [Always] - The Best Men Can Be [Gillette] - Reindeer Games [Microsoft] - Eat the Ice Cream [Halo Top] - Dilly Dilly [Bud Light] - Dream Crazy [Nike] - Monty the Penguin [John Lewis] - The Epic Split [Volvo] - Dave's Epic Strut [MoneySupermarket] - Real Beauty Sketches [Dove] - I Will What I Want [Under Armour] - Plash Speed [Sony; subtitles] - Wes Anderson: Come Together [H&M] - Thank You, Mom [P&G] - Share a Coke [Coca-Cola] [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 11:47 AM PST - 31 comments

Aga Khan Museum and Amarrass Records Launch New Docuseries "Searching For The Blues." [Amarrass Records'] project and mission to conserve, promote, and sustain traditional folk music resonated with the Aga Khan Museum, which partnered with them to produce the three-part docuseries "Searching for the Blues." [more inside]
posted by NoMich at 11:13 AM PST - 8 comments

Africa, by Toto, played entirely on in-game instruments in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask.
posted by cortex at 9:29 AM PST - 26 comments

Three graduate students at Harvard have filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against the school and anthropology professor John Comaroff over the professor's conduct and the university turning a blind eye to it. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:27 AM PST - 86 comments

In September 2004, a toy frog was lost. The internet became excited. It was soon explained. This is a Doubles Joubilee repost of links by darukaru, azul, and vaportrail. It appears that nearly all of the links in posts and comments still work, with one mysterious exception. The meme lifetime models in this paper may need an additional nostalgia/obsession term that becomes significant at late times. [more inside]
posted by eotvos at 8:03 AM PST - 19 comments

RIP Betty Davis, the Trailblazing Queen of Funk and former wife of trumpeter Miles Davis. They said she was different, and they weren't lying. You can learn more by watching the 2017 documentary (Betty: They Say I'm Different), or maybe just playing some of her tunes (a lot of which really are NSFW). More here, here, and hear the last song she wrote here.
posted by SystematicAbuse at 7:01 AM PST - 42 comments

Gerhard Richter, one of the greatest contemporary artists alive, turned ninety this week. Deutsche Welle maps out his long and illustrious career (in English), and the New York Review of Books covers a 2020 exhibition of his in New York City (PDF, no paywall). [more inside]
posted by Umami Dearest at 6:33 AM PST - 4 comments

From oulipian in 2016:
The Walk of Life Project. Hypothesis: “Walk of Life” by Dire Straits is the perfect song to end any movie. (via Paleofuture)
A number of Edgar Wright movies were added in 2018, but since then it has been waiting quietly for updates.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:48 PM PST - 17 comments

Susan Stewart (Public Domain Review, 02/09/2022), "A Paper Archaeology: Piranesi's Ruinous Fantasias": "the grotteschi--their broken statues, columns, tombs, roundels, reliefs, herms, cornucopias, shells, fasces, cameos, trumpets, bones, skulls, chains, mooring rings, and urns; their half-erased or faint inscriptions, rosettes, portraits, egg-and-dart moldings; their hazy skies, intimations of the sea, pines and palms, cascades, broken sticks and weeds, entwined with snakes and vines." Piranesi: Opere varie di architettura, prospettiva, groteschi, antichità; Vedute di Roma; Le Antichità Romane - Tomo Primo, Secondo, Terzo, Quarto; Vasi, candelabri, ... ; Le rovine del castello dell'Acqva Givlia; Carceri d'invenzione; etc.. Previously.
posted by Wobbuffet at 4:43 PM PST - 23 comments

“I had someone tell me the other day that the checkout person at Trader Joe’s was ‘love bombing’ them..." (SLNYT) [more inside]
posted by girlmightlive at 2:33 PM PST - 94 comments

Dotdash Meredith is ending the monthly print publications for Entertainment Weekly, InStyle, EatingWell, Health, Parents and People en Español. The publications will go digital-only effective today, and the transition is expected to terminate roughly 200 positions on the print side.
posted by Clustercuss at 12:17 PM PST - 34 comments

You probably remember the video of Gary Chambers telling Connie to resign from the school board for shopping instead of talking about racism. Or maybe you saw his recent campaign video about the racism of marijuana prohibition. Well, he just released a new advertisement where he sets fire to a confederate flag.
posted by rebent at 11:34 AM PST - 33 comments

In 2009, years before he would fully debase himself in service of neofascist Trumpist iconography, conservative painter Jon McNaughton graced the internet with a work that he claimed "may truly be the most important new painting of the twenty first century": One Nation Under God. A veritable who's-who of right-wing bugaboos and sacred cows, McNaughton felt compelled to include an interactive canvas to explain the myriad symbols... a gimmick that was soon brilliantly skewered by Shortpacked! creator David Willis. Blithe to criticism, McNaughton would follow up this opus with more Kinkade-meets-Garrison giclée schlock that would embody the conservative psychodrama of the 2010s, including The Forgotten Man, Legacy of Hope, and -- what else? -- NFTs. But is he trolling the left, or the right?
posted by Rhaomi at 11:34 AM PST - 53 comments

IKEA Heights is a 7 episode soap opera secretly filmed inside a Burbank, California IKEA. The show… traces the bizarre lives of a detective hunting a murderer (who smothers his victims with pillows from the bedding section) and two brothers, one recovering from amnesia, the other married to a cheating wife (who also spends a lot of time among the bedroom furniture). It was created by Dave Seger, Paul Bartunek, Delbert Shoopman, Spencer Strauss, and Tom Kauffman for Channel 101 and features Randall Park, who went on to play Louis Huang in Fresh Off the Boat, Danny Chung in Veep, Dr. Stephen Shin in the Aquaman movies, and Marcus in Always Be My Maybe. Previously on MeFi in 2009.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 8:53 AM PST - 18 comments

Suburban moms are mobilizing, to counter conservatives in fights over masks, book bans and diversity education in today's WaPo (archive link) -‌- all about Red, Wine and Blue, "Channeling the Power of Suburban Women". [more inside]
posted by Rash at 8:45 AM PST - 42 comments

Brad Pitt's Make It Right Foundation (previously) built 109 eye-catching and affordable homes in New Orleans for a community where many people were displaced by damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Just a few years later, the vast majority of these homes are now riddled with construction-related problems that have led to mold, termites, rotting wood, flooding and other woes. At least six are boarded up and abandoned. Many residents have filed lawsuits that are still pending. Make It Right, despite what its name might suggest, has not resolved these issues and has stopped assisting residents. Instead, the movie star-led nonprofit has apparently become defunct.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:35 AM PST - 36 comments

Q: Chiptuned Steely Dan?
A: Chiptuned Steely Dan. (Via) [more inside]
posted by gauche at 7:17 AM PST - 43 comments

The National Trust of Scotland, which manages the home, describes it as “dissolving like an aspirin in a glass of water.” [via]
posted by ellieBOA at 5:53 AM PST - 39 comments

Cyd Harrell, at wired.com: Intrusive surveillance has become a parental rite of passage in America. But the parental panopticon is not a mark of maturity and responsibility but rather of paranoia, distrust, and devolvement. The Kid Surveillance Complex Locks Parents in a Trap. [more inside]
posted by mbrubeck at 7:50 PM PST - 96 comments

Back in in 2020, in the midst of the BLM demonstrations, a media figure who for a loooong time has staked out the “curmudgeonly” view of Canadian politics, and who has been invited time and again to share his views on the national broadcasting system, wrote a National Post editorial, asking questions about how racist Canada actually was. In December, Deputy Minister Daniel Quan-Watson decided to answer those questions from his personal point of view. It's a half hour long but worth watching. If you don't feel inclined to sit through it, there's a transcript.
posted by brachiopod at 6:27 PM PST - 26 comments

Step 1: steal billions in bitcoin. Step 2: Write and perform a terrible rap that pretty much confesses to the crime. [more inside]
posted by NoMich at 4:54 PM PST - 105 comments

Some contemporary overtone singers from Tuva, Mongolia, Buryatia and nearby places are makiing very slick music videos today. I'm taking advantage of Doubles Joubilee to repost something I gave up on because it was largely a duplicate of Kattulus' thoughtful 2020 post about the specific band, The Hu. [more inside]
posted by eotvos at 3:55 PM PST - 4 comments

Douglas Trumbull, visual effects visionary, has died at 79. Legendary for his work on 2001: A Space Odyssey (including the Star Gate sequence), he also had a hand in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner and The Tree of Life, and directed Silent Running and Brainstorm.
posted by oulipian at 3:41 PM PST - 61 comments

What the Heck is Going On with the U.S. Economy? What matters more, a booming economy or spiking inflation? Ezra Klein interviews Jason Furman, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration. [more inside]
posted by russilwvong at 3:03 PM PST - 13 comments

I trained an AI on public domain bird illustrations from old books. Ornithologists and birders, I'd LOVE it if you were able to still ID some of these weirdos. I'll share some of the "normal" results first, the ones that kinda sorta look like real birds. (sltwitter -- threadreader link)
posted by curious nu at 2:38 PM PST - 21 comments

PaperPaul is working on an art project called The Pop-up Book of Memes. That's it. That's the post. [more inside]
posted by drlith at 2:11 PM PST - 6 comments

‘Extrapolation’ may be a purer ideal. The term is imported from mathematics: a writer, keenly observing the world around them, can measure its trends and implications, then offer persuasive suppositions about what comes next. Yet, like multi-tasking or Tantric sex, extrapolation is easier to name than it is to find examples of people really doing it, or doing it well. A few, like Philip K. Dick, seem cursed to endure it as an abreactive symptom, a cry of protest at living through the 20th century. Stanisław Lem belongs in that company of SF writers – Wells, Olaf Stapledon, Kim Stanley Robinson – who have practised intentional extrapolation with regular and sustained success. from My Year of Reading Lemmishly by Jonathan Lethem [LRB; Archive] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:08 PM PST - 15 comments

Celebrate women in STEM with these nifty posters from Canada's Ingenium.
posted by Shepherd at 1:45 PM PST - 9 comments

For Doubles Jubilee, let's take another look at Godot, a compact, lightweight, yet really capable game development system. It runs on, and can make games for, many platforms! It's approaching a 4.0 release! It's gotten much better in the nearly two years since I first posted it, and had a burst of popularity spurred on by Unity's recent pushing of people towards upgrading to Pro. There are now many YouTube resources to help people learn it. For people who learn best through text, there's also the official documentation and their tutorial page. (Previously, in 2020)
posted by JHarris at 12:18 PM PST - 15 comments

Twelve years ago, to celebrate their initiation week, 172 communications students at the University of Quebec at Montreal decided to put on a show. After weeks of preparation, the costumed and prop-wielding crowd enacted an exuberant, complex, and flawlessly-choreographed performance of the Black Eyed Peas song "I Gotta Feeling" that sprawled through the campus's multi-story Judith Jasmin Pavilion... and they did it all in one continuous take (on their second try). A look behind the scenes. A decade later, a new student body recreated the spectacle with a new song. It was the capstone on a long-running fad called lipdubbing -- a video phenomenon where a single camera moves through a crowd of highly coordinated lip-syncers in a single seamless take, with the original recording dubbed over the finished product. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 11:28 AM PST - 14 comments

This years THR Roundtable discussions have been trickling out for a bit now. They're all pretty good discussions, IMO. Also -- they're sitting together talking! It's like from the Before Times! In no particular order: Directors Roundtable (Kenneth Branagh, Jane Campion, Guillermo del Toro, Asghas Farhadi, Reinaldo Marcus Gree, and Pedro Almodóvar) [51m] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 10:40 AM PST - 6 comments

Fans of The Linda Lindas (previously) may enjoy the edgier, but equally awesome, music of North Carolina-based punk band The Muslims (YouTube). [more inside]
posted by daisystomper at 10:17 AM PST - 13 comments

behold.... MATHLER!!! You may find yourself googling the order of operations. [more inside]
posted by wowenthusiast at 9:44 AM PST - 54 comments

What it says on the tin.
posted by y2karl at 9:38 AM PST - 15 comments

What's the most important factor in a guitar's tone? Well, apparently it's not like 99% of the guitar, including the part that looks like a guitar or that a normal human being would refer to as "a guitar".
posted by cortex at 8:19 AM PST - 91 comments

Following a worm "In addition to a hole where the seal has been torn away and wear holes, it has worm holes, and the question was how the letter had been folded when the worm(s) made them. While we don’t know the exact number of worms involved, for simplicity’s sake we will assume that there was only one, very energetic, worm. From whence did the worm come? Where did it go?" [via]
posted by dhruva at 8:05 AM PST - 3 comments

And then, by the application of skill so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic, it does just that. French Horn Repair part 1 (8m6s), part 2 (5m42s) and part 3 (11m28s) are but the tiniest taste of the balm for the battered soul that is Wes Lee Music Repair (YouTube).
posted by flabdablet at 6:33 AM PST - 20 comments

Mel Mermelstein, Holocaust Survivor Who Sued Deniers, Dies at 95. Mel Mermelstein survived Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, and Buchenwald, the sole member of his immediate family to make it out, and made a life for himself in the United States. In 1980, he sued the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review when they claimed they would pay out a cash reward of $50,000 to anyone who could prove the Nazi regime had committed mass murder of Jews in gas chambers, and refused to honor the agreement when he presented his own notarized eyewitness statement. He sued and won $90,000 and a formal apology, and as a result of the case the Holocaust was confirmed as a legally incontestable fact by the Superior Court of Los Angeles County in 1981. [more inside]
posted by potrzebie at 10:57 PM PST - 64 comments

Matt Schlian makes mesmerizing rhythmic sculptures out of paper and glue.
posted by janell at 9:00 PM PST - 6 comments

Losing a Best Friend A short, moving excerpt from “The world is a sphere of ice and our hands are made of fire” by Ritika Jyala. Beautifully read, and the words also appear on screen.
posted by Bottlecap at 3:49 PM PST - 45 comments

Right-wing demagogues tried to take over a small town in the Pacific Northwest. Here’s how concerned citizens stopped them.
posted by ShooBoo at 2:54 PM PST - 28 comments

qntm (previously, previously), author of the sci-fi short story Lena (previously), has a bit more to say: “Lena” isn’t about uploading.
posted by mbrubeck at 2:20 PM PST - 21 comments

Our expectations for the decade (and beyond) were doomed from the very start [Mel Magazine, with YouTube supercut] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:52 PM PST - 36 comments

Laser cut generative art. A non-platonic non-symmetrical solid with eight faces, each cut from 30% transparent plastic with each pair of connected faces held together by a plywood joinery system I developed.
posted by curious nu at 1:49 PM PST - 11 comments

Syl Johnson, Mississippi-born Chicago soul singer, has passed away at age 85. His biggest chart hit was 'Is It Because I'm Black,' on what is arguably the first soul concept album, but his most enduring song might be 'Different Strokes', one of the most sampled songs of all time.
posted by box at 1:31 PM PST - 12 comments

STARFORGE uses Meshless Finite Mass MHD method in conjunction with GIZMO's various radiative transfer solvers to resolve the formation, motion, and feedback from individual stars forming in GMCs. I don't know what that means either, but here's an incredibly rad visualization it made of some kind of cosmic super soaker fight and a gorgeous fly-around of the aftermath.
posted by theodolite at 1:22 PM PST - 5 comments

MS Paint Masterpieces, the most intricately drawn Mega Man Sprite Comic, may be back, with nine updates so far in 2022 on an MWF schedule (about as many as the last seven years combined). After starting in 2000 with art and characterization only barely distinct from any other sprite comic, the author gradually began to employ more detailed backgrounds and a widening variety of artistic effects and original pixel art, despite making every comic entirely in MS Paint. It has retold the stories of Mega Man 1 & 2 and is starting in on 3, while increasingly incorporating obscurer characters like the Mega Man Killers and Stardroids from the Gameboy games, plus many original characters by the author ("Disgruntled Ferret") and other sprite comic authors. [more inside]
posted by one for the books at 11:53 AM PST - 1 comment

Just over a dozen years ago, Andy Richter destroyed Wolf Blitzer in Celebrity Jeopardy (twice, if you count the rehearsal show). His final score of $68,000 (donated to St. Jude's) remains the highest one-day total for the invitational. Of course, Richter is no stranger to the game. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 11:25 AM PST - 6 comments

The Internet Sacred Text Archive is an online archive of electronic texts about religion, mythology, and various esoteric topics. The site has many complete books from a wide variety of traditions, including the only (to their knowledge) comprehensive online translations of the Kalevala, Shinto texts, and the Upanishads. There's a lot of fascinating stuff here.
Since the original 2003 FPP 2003, sacred-texts has been referenced in passing in a number of other posts. John Bruno Hare, the site’s creator, passed away in 2010.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:22 AM PST - 4 comments

On Friday, Angela Liddon, a Canadian food personality whose brand, Oh She Glows, encompasses multiple popular social media profiles, a website and a slew of bestselling cookbooks, posted this ~wild~ Instagram Story that breathlessly proclaimed her support for the trucker convoy. [more inside]
posted by chococat at 10:34 AM PST - 93 comments

*slaps roof of website* this baby can fit so many Free Threads in it

Come on in and chat about whatever. Did your family have a minivan? My family had a minivan. You don't have to talk about minivans, I just sort of got thinking about that. Hi! [more inside]
posted by cortex at 9:24 AM PST - 301 comments

Necropug: Hungry Demon (slyt)
posted by overeducated_alligator at 8:56 AM PST - 7 comments

"When the comic strip meshes fiction with architectural imagination, however, it’s not only the speculation on future architectural scenarios that takes place. It’s also the recording and the critiquing of the urban conditions of either our contemporary cities or the cities of the past."

Matthew Maganga writes an excellent compare and contrast article in Arch Daily featuring Aya set in an Ivory Coast 18 years removed from its independence from France, while Berlin’s story spans the fall of the Weimar Republic in the German capital.
posted by infini at 7:18 AM PST - 2 comments

Lenny Lipton is a Cornell physics graduate in the class of 1962. He is "recognized as the father of the electronic stereoscopic display industry," and "was the lead inventor of the current state-of-the-art technologies that enable today's theatrical filmmakers to project their feature films in 3D." He holds over 50 patents, including whizbang-sounding inventions such as "electrostereoscopic eyewear," "synthetic panoramagram," and "autostereoscopic lenticular screen." His inventions have been used by NASA and its contractors on the Mars rover and the Hubble Space Telescope. Lipton was also a prolific filmmaker in his younger days: from 1965-75 he made 25 short films. His filmography is now a part of the Pacific Film Archive at the Berkeley Art Museum. Lipton was also a successful author, having written several books about filmmaking technique including "The Super 8 Book," "Independent Filmmaking," "Lipton on Filmmaking," and a 2021 release about the history of cinema technology. But to the world outside of 3-D tech and independent film (I guess that's pretty much the whole world when you round down), Lipton is most famous as a songwriter. This is true even though he wrote only one song in his life, and did so inadvertently. [more inside]
posted by AgentRocket at 6:52 AM PST - 18 comments

Her Maj tweeted this lovely picture. You would think that the contents of the red box would be official business. And you'd be right. (Single link Imgur of a Twitter thread)
posted by evilmomlady at 4:50 AM PST - 35 comments

In total, a staggering 83 active-duty soldiers stationed at Fort Bragg died in the 18 months ending June 2021, according to data obtained by Rolling Stone. [...] The Army can’t or won’t say how a whole platoon’s worth of soldiers died at its largest installation, home of the Special Forces, the Airborne Corps, and the Joint Special Operations Command. Over this same 18-month period, just three Fort Bragg soldiers died in overseas combat, meaning these elite troops are a dizzying 27 times more likely to die stateside than in war zones such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.

[more inside]
posted by chappell, ambrose at 3:17 AM PST - 40 comments

"wondering what an 18th Century AskMe might have looked like?" The National Archives 'Founders List' Comment inspired Here. double/double [more inside]
posted by clavdivs at 10:19 PM PST - 1 comment

A federal judge this week declined to issue a temporary restraining order (TRO) against a California sheriff who used civil forfeiture to rob armored cars carrying money earned by state-licensed marijuana businesses. [Reason]

In traffic stops of Empyreal vans in November and December, sheriff’s deputies seized more than $1 million in cash and turned the money over to the FBI for forfeiture. The FBI says it suspects the money comes from illegal drug sales and money laundering, but it has revealed no evidence to support the claim and no one has been charged with any crime. [Los Angeles Times]
posted by riruro at 5:19 PM PST - 45 comments

The Nightingale of India, the Queen of Melody, the Voice of the Millennium: Lata Mangeshkar has died at 92. [more inside]
posted by pH Indicating Socks at 4:58 PM PST - 17 comments

Before software ate the world, finance already had. Ian Bogost (previously) reflects on blockchain and NFTs. (SLAtlantic) [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 4:13 PM PST - 50 comments

Marvin Gaye -- Got to Give It Up

The Five Stairsteps - Ooh Child

Al Green -- I'm So Tired of Being Alone (10/30/71) 1st Soul Train Appearance: Yikes!!!

The Second Time Around due to link rot in the Previously

[more inside]
posted by y2karl at 1:06 PM PST - 15 comments

"What if America wasn't America?" That was the question posed by a series of ads broadcast in the wake of the September 11th attacks, ads which depicted a dystopian America bereft of liberty: Library - Diner - Church - Arrest. Together with more positive ads like It All Starts with Freedom, Remember Freedom, and I Am an American, they encouraged frightened viewers to cherish their liberties and defend against division and prejudice in the face of terrorism [20 years previously]. The campaign was the work of the Ad Council, a non-profit agency that employs the creative muscle of volunteer advertisers to raise awareness for social issues of national importance. Founded during WWII as the War Advertising Council, the organization has been behind some of the most memorable public service campaigns in American history, including Rosie the Riveter, Smokey Bear, McGruff the Crime Dog, and the Crash Test Dummies. And the Council is still at it today, producing striking, funny, and above all effective PSAs on everything from student invention to global warming to arts education to John Cena reminding us that loving America means loving all Americans, dammit [previously]. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 11:23 AM PST - 19 comments

The Making of a Modern Republican (Jonathan Swan and Lachlan Markay for Axios) Paths to power and winning elections inside the GOP are changing rapidly and radically, spawning a new generation of kingmakers while diminishing the clout of many who lorded over the party for years.
posted by box at 9:03 AM PST - 37 comments

Revisiting, revising, and expanding a couple of previous posts, here is The Terminator Complete Motion Picture Score [1h12m, with track links in description], released in 2016, over 30 years after the movie's release. Also available as a YouTube playlist. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 7:26 AM PST - 11 comments

Listening to Books by Maggie Gram "I thought about starting this essay by insisting that I listen to audio books for work, so that I could not be mistaken for that other kind of person, that kind of person who listens audio books because it brings her some kind of unsophisticated pleasure. I am not, I wanted you to know, your Aunt Paula. My kitchen is not decorated with rooster towel racks and rooster potholders and rooster trim. I am a very serious person." [more inside]
posted by Zumbador at 5:27 AM PST - 71 comments

One of the most fun periods of basketball I can remember. Every game my friends and I would get together and watch and every time there was a new highlight or memory to get excited about. [more inside]
posted by 47WaysToLeaveYourLover at 11:53 PM PST - 9 comments

The Grey Areas of Romance: A Measure of Presumptuous Romantic Intentions attempts to quantify the likelihood of jerkiness (and more dangerous behaviors) in dating based on self-reported, planned behavior.
posted by eotvos at 2:23 PM PST - 55 comments

They Rushed to Buy in the Pandemic. Here’s What They Would Change. For nearly two years, home buyers have been shopping in conditions ripe for regret. Prices have soared, inventory has plunged and competition has been brutal in markets across the country. With fixer-uppers fetching multiple offers, buyers must make snap decisions about what is often the biggest financial investment of their lives. Invariably, someone makes a choice they wish they hadn’t. Unpaywall
posted by Toddles at 1:54 PM PST - 95 comments

"Saying goodbye to Steve, the reader who commented on everything I wrote for 17 years" -- reflections after death closes the door on an exchange of correspondence between a journalist/music critic and an older reader who was always willing to give something a listen.
posted by drlith at 1:02 PM PST - 11 comments

Argon Zark! was not the first webcomic, but it was the first comic designed explicitly for the web. Boasting computer coloring, 3D models, page-specific background images, animations, and bonus features (all the pages in book 2 are clickable), it's perhaps most notable for how much later webcomics did not follow its example. While WEBTOON engages with smartphones by providing background music and very tall comics designed for scrolling, similar to Scott McCloud's experiments, and notable exceptions like Homestuck delved even farther into multimedia than Argon Zark! did, almost all webcomics are static images with the same dimensions strip after strip, often resembling either newspaper strips or graphic novels in their content and design. [more inside]
posted by one for the books at 12:47 PM PST - 2 comments

It was a simple story about a responsible owl, trying to raise a curious (human) son and a geeky (human) daughter in their giant treehouse while dealing with his longtime bear buddy (and honey researcher), Steve. Though it debuted, humbly enough, in the Cracked.com forums, Benjamin Driscoll's drolly sweet comic Daisy Owl soon gained a loyal following, earning a regular feature there and routinely making the front pages of sites like Digg and Reddit. In March 2009, Driscoll went pro, quitting his job to work on the comic full-time and making Daisy Owl one of the few self-sufficient webcomics on the net. Its quirky, character-driven humor, focused mainly on children, friendship, and families, earned comparisons to a PG-rated Achewood, as well as plenty of fan art. Highlights: Basement - Honey - Parenting - Shampoo - Skittle on the Moon - Nightmare - Movie Night - Thrift Store - Classic Dad - Wallpapers [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 11:10 AM PST - 7 comments

Fallout from the truckers occupying Canada's capitol continue, although I'm finding negligible coverage of the situation in US media. Today, a counter-protest has been scheduled for 2-5PM. Ottawa City News: Residents begin counter-protesting downtown Ottawa convoy. Globe and Mail: Nunavut Senator quits Conservative caucus over Ottawa convoy protests. Al Jazeera: Ottawa residents decry anti vaccine trucker occupation. What's it like for them? Twitter@glen_mcgregor: This was the audio landscape in a residential area of downtown Ottawa Wednesday morning. After hearing that, I wish I was close enough to join them, today. Right On, Ottawa! [more inside]
posted by Rash at 10:19 AM PST - 446 comments

Professor Elemental has released a charity single, "I Love Libraries," with profits donated to the Friends of Peter Gladwin School to help buy new and inclusive books.
posted by Shepherd at 8:48 AM PST - 5 comments

Sister Janet Mead, who had a hit single with her rendition of the Lord's Prayer in 1974, has died (NYT). Born in Adelaide, Sister Janet joined the Sisters of Mercy when she was 17 and became a music teacher in local schools. She had already been staging rock Masses with the goal of reaching out to young people. She was making records for her school when she was discovered by a music producer in Sydney. The Lord's Prayer was originally the B side of the record she made, but Australian disc jockeys loved the Lord's Prayer, which became a hit in Australia and then the US. She was nominated for a Grammy for best inspirational performance, but lost out to Elvis. [more inside]
posted by FencingGal at 7:45 AM PST - 19 comments

Pence rebukes Trump: ‘I had no right to overturn the election’ — After Trump said at a recent rally that he’s considering pardons for those arrested for involvement in the Jan. 6 riots, Pence described it as a “dark day.”, Meridith McGraw, POLITICO, 02/04/2022: In a speech to the conservative Federalist Society on Friday, former Vice President Mike Pence rebuked his one time boss, Donald Trump, decrying the notion that he could have overturned the election results on the 45th president’s behalf. [more inside]
posted by cenoxo at 6:55 AM PST - 45 comments

Facebook just had its worst day ever on Wall Street (NPR). Mark Zuckerberg lost $31 billion (CNN). The top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages in the last 24 hours (Twitter).
posted by valkane at 6:40 AM PST - 59 comments

The Zealot Gene [multi-link page for listening] is Jethro Tull's first album of all new material YouTube playlist] since 1999's J-Tull Dot Com. (Yes, I know.) It's the first Tull album [Wikipedia] to have an entirely new line-up aside from Ian Anderson. Released Jan 28, 2022. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:10 PM PST - 10 comments

Three (four?) Pinocchio movies are coming out this year. Let's look to Russia for some alternatives, hm? All live-action unless otherwise noted:

The Golden Key (1939) (English subtitles; click the CC button)
The Adventures of Buratino (1959) (as Pinocchio and the Golden Key, the 1995 English dub of the Soyuzmultfilm animation, starring Bill Murray) (original undubbed version)
The Adventures of Buratino, first half, second half (1975) (English subtitles)
Buratino, first half, second half (2009) (untranslated) [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 7:18 PM PST - 10 comments

April 1, 2022 will mark 42 years since Einstürzende Neubauten first performed. [more inside]
posted by mubba at 4:51 PM PST - 34 comments

Whispered about on back alley forums, yearned for but never found, it's thought to be the lost first album by Canadian experimental post-rock legends Godspeed You! Black Emperor. While the band has long-assumed it would surface on the internet one day, we have so far only witnessed foul pretenders. Until now... witness All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling [more inside]
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 3:52 PM PST - 20 comments

How We Broke the Supply Chain (David Dayen and Rakeen Mabud for The American Prospect) Rampant outsourcing, financialization, monopolization, deregulation, and just-in-time logistics are the culprits. [more inside]
posted by box at 12:44 PM PST - 67 comments

The work-from-home phenomenon has triggered a fresh frustration for U.S. corporations: Americans are blowing the whistle on their employers like never before. Matt Levine [Bloomberg Opinions] contextualizes the findings: grooming new people to engage in fraud takes time, social flattery, and bonding, and COVID isolation makes that a lot harder and makes it a lot easier for new people to complain to compliance officers. More data on the phenomenon from the SEC at Bloomberg.
posted by sciatrix at 11:31 AM PST - 24 comments

Furries fundraise for intellectual freedom I didn't have "furries raise money to help fight back against library censorship and book banning" on my 2022 bingo card. "Last week, a Mississippi mayor tried to strong-arm a local library into banning some books. The result was swift, and in retrospect, entirely predictable: A group of furries got on Twitter to do something about it." I'm delighted by this bit of news.
posted by SaharaRose at 11:10 AM PST - 17 comments

"Once upon a time there was a game that nobody ever played, sitting on the floor in the back room of an empty arcade. The game was full of life and strife, mega-monsters and robot fights. We Are The Strange was the title. Now meet the players who live inside, idle." Fifteen years on, revisit the improbable story of outsider filmmaker M dot Strange and his solo indie fever dream, We Are The Strange. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 11:09 AM PST - 2 comments

Remember when all we did on the Internet was Look at This Cat? So much so that there was a MeFi project and FPP about this very thing? [more inside]
posted by fiercekitten at 11:07 AM PST - 11 comments

I decided to attempt the task myself and found it very hard going. The resulting piece is over the fold. I tried a few outlets for it, and no one was interested in publishing it. So, I’m putting it out here, with all its faults.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 9:14 AM PST - 35 comments

Let's let the guy we're investigating decide whether we can publish what we find out. Nothing wrong with that, right!? [more inside]
posted by 47WaysToLeaveYourLover at 8:47 AM PST - 10 comments

As Coutts anti-mandate blockade continues, Alberta government plans to drop vaccine passports: With attention on the "Freedom Convoy" in Ottawa, some of us may have missed the Alberta/Montana blockade. The Kenney government appears poised to end vaccine passports (referred to as the Restrictions Exemption Program). I'm hearing rumors of the provincial government looking for ways to override municipal mask bylaws but I haven't started digging for verification.
posted by elkevelvet at 7:37 AM PST - 83 comments

Don’t feel too bad. Not everyone is born with talent. [more inside]
posted by scratch at 7:25 AM PST - 36 comments

The ar5iv.org project makes articles from arXiv.org accessible as responsive HTML5 web pages. Sample paper: A Simple Proof of the Quadratic Formula (1910.06709) [more inside]
posted by kmt at 3:21 AM PST - 18 comments

𝕱or 𝕯oubles 𝕵ubilee, let us all revisit the Net Libram of Random Magical Effects (PDF), still a D10000 table a DM can roll on for incredibly random wild magic surge effects, now available as a site where you can roll on it by just pressing a button. (Previously, in 2019) [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 2:44 AM PST - 33 comments

Kaitlyn Tiffany writes for the Atlantic about Tumblr's history and culture, the deleterious effects of its various buyers, and how the Tumblr-4chan skirmishes—such as "Operation Overkitten"—evolved into today's all-consuming culture wars. Kyle Chayka counters for the New Yorker, emphasizing Tumblr's rediscovered appeal as a social space free from the eyes of brands and algorithms.
posted by one for the books at 10:19 PM PST - 32 comments

Addison Del Mastro noticed something a little off about a Pizza Hut restaurant in Landover, Maryland. Solving this small puzzle of everyday architectural history leads to musing about times and places in the recent past that are poorly document and rapidly slipping into oblivion.
posted by drlith at 8:52 PM PST - 39 comments

Those who grew up with the Commodore 64 will certainly remember Impossible Mission – a brutally difficult and platform-defining puzzle-platformer. Now it's been faithfully recreated in JavaScript, and you can play it in your web browser. [more inside]
posted by escape from the potato planet at 5:44 PM PST - 30 comments

February is Zine Month, an event to encourage the release of table-top roleplaying game zines. Around 25 zines have already been released, with piles more on the way. These run the gamut from solo journaling games to NPC generators to pre-made adventures to full Powered-by-the-Apocalypse micro RPGs. Everything from Stack of Goblins to Hexingtide. And to look inside a couple examples, check out "Exploring the Weird World of D&D Zines" (Part 2). [more inside]
posted by kaibutsu at 5:14 PM PST - 1 comment

The newest Linda Linda music video "Growing Up" is out and the album is available for preorder. [more inside]
posted by toastyk at 4:16 PM PST - 16 comments

Those that were politicised by the era marked by the Financial Crash will remember when nothing, not even the austerity policies imposed in its wake, could be described as political. Today, everything is politics. And yet, despite people being intensely politicised in all of these dimensions, very few are involved in the kind of organised conflict of interests that we might once have described as politics in the classical, twentieth-century sense.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 2:29 PM PST - 18 comments

"I recently watched some of the talks from this conference on my laptop. They hit like parodies of a bygone era, so ridiculous that it made me almost nostalgic for a time when TED talks captivated me. Back then, around a decade ago, I watched those articulate, audacious, composed people talk about how they were building robots that would eat trash and turn it into oxygen, or whatever, and I felt hopeful about the future. But the trash-eating robots never arrived. With some distance, now, from a world in which TED seemed to offer a bright path forward, it’s time to ask: what exactly is TED? And what happened to the future it envisioned?"
posted by Lycaste at 2:07 PM PST - 64 comments

Vernon "Dr. Daddy-O" Winslow was the first black radio DJ in New Orleans, starting out by writing for other DJs before getting on the air with his own "Jivin' With Jax" slot in 1949. An extensive collection of his aircheck recordings from 1949 to 1958, basically everything except copyrighted music, have been digitized as part of the Hogan Archive of New Orleans Music and New Orleans Jazz in Tulane University's Special Collections Digital Library program. [more inside]
posted by rhizome at 2:05 PM PST - 3 comments

The metaphor for our times [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:34 PM PST - 41 comments

Wisdom Kaye is a very online fashion model whose Marvel-hero inspired outfits on Tiktok (also here as a tweet) blew up back in October. They started with the villains and made a few follow-up videos including one with Groot and Scarlett Witch among others. According to Kaye, the Tony Stark outfits took over 7 hours.
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:57 PM PST - 6 comments

Reviving and revisiting several previous posts, I'm pleased to bring you Einstein On The Beach [Vimeo link], the full 4h30m intermissionless performance from the 2012-2013 revival/tour of this seminal and infrequently performed Philip Glass opera. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 12:20 PM PST - 20 comments

For Doubles Jubilee month, relive the thrills of this classic Ask from JannaK: In my grandmother's final days battling brain cancer, she became unable to speak and she filled dozens of index cards with random letters of the alphabet. I'm beginning to think that they are the first letters in the words of song lyrics, and would love to know what song this was. This is a crazy long shot, but I've seen Mefites pull off some pretty impressive code-breaking before! [more inside]
posted by roger ackroyd at 11:52 AM PST - 14 comments

Black History, Black Freedom, and Black Love is a masterclass from Masterclass -- streaming free for Black History Month. Instructors are Jelani Cobb, Cornel West, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, John McWhorter, Sherilyn Ifill, and Angela Davis.
posted by dobbs at 11:51 AM PST - 8 comments

"I wish I knew him better. But he was just a boy when I left." Originally posted here. [more inside]
posted by Ipsifendus at 11:07 AM PST - 7 comments

From grainy stills to gorgeous high-resolution portraits, from intimate pairings to stark contrasts, and from iconic standbys to little-known surprises, The Planetary Society's Earth gallery offers a rich collection of stunning photography and video footage of our world as seen from both planetary spacecraft and geostationary satellites. It is a vista that has inspired many a deep thought in the lucky few that have seen it firsthand [previously]. And it's just one of a number of annotated collections from the Bruce Murray Space Image Library.
posted by Rhaomi at 10:42 AM PST - 2 comments

There Are Too Many Video Games "There are too many indie games. If my country was healthy, stable, and on a sustainable path, most of them would not exist, including mine. That they do exist is a symptom of misplaced priorities, crappy opportunities for ambitious youth, and ongoing damage to our society." (previously) [more inside]
posted by simmering octagon at 10:32 AM PST - 72 comments

Anti-Democratic influence on the Supreme Court All of us need to be aware of the critical impact of bias on Supreme Court in the US. This was recognized by Justice Kennedy in 2015 and is explored further in this article
posted by Scout405 at 9:23 AM PST - 7 comments

15 years after NASA astronomer David Williams started searching for them, hundreds of trees grown from space-faring seeds are still missing. Here. [more inside]
posted by IndelibleUnderpants at 8:10 AM PST - 19 comments

Wikimedia contributor Cmglee created a nifty comparison of pyramids showing the profiles of many famous, pointy human constructions. (They also discuss how to make dynamic svgs for the web.)
posted by eotvos at 7:47 AM PST - 10 comments

Trial by Fieri: an Ill-Advised Zelda LTTP Randomized Run. In which a flavor blasted celebrity chef takes on the mantle of the Hero of Time, finds an orb, and then dies 200 times to the same laser squid. [more inside]
posted by curious nu at 7:42 AM PST - 10 comments

Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison discusses five large-scale projects to capture water from monsoons, create water tables, refill aquifers, and bring farming to deserts and deforested regions [slyt]
posted by rebent at 5:35 AM PST - 8 comments

Scottish Championship football team Raith Rovers recently bought David Goodwillie for an undisclosed sum from League 1 side Clyde. Although he has never been convicted, Goodwillie was one of two footballers successfully sued for rape in a civil case in Edinburgh court of sessions in 2017. £100,000 was awarded to the pursuer Denise Clair (who waived her right to anonymity) with the judge ruling that on the balance of probabilities both footballers raped her. This decision was upheld on appeal. Goodwillie's signing caused an outcry in Kirkcaldy and more broadly in Scotland. [more inside]
posted by plonkee at 4:39 AM PST - 15 comments

MeFite cwest (who seems to have abandoned us five years ago) on the DVD release of The Unknown War: WWII And The Epic Battles Of The Russian Front from 1978, which only now am I getting around to viewing. Hosted by Burt Lancaster; music by Rod McKuen.
posted by Rash at 5:07 PM PST - 13 comments

Ballroom etiquette was not complete without a Dance Card. 'Sticking to the Dance Card': Was this the App before the Apps? Here is an example from Tulane Universities Digital Archive. 'Thank Goodness We Don’t Have To Do That Anymore: Dance Cards' [more inside]
posted by clavdivs at 2:10 PM PST - 25 comments

The leading candidates to replace Erin O'Toole The knives have been out for a while. The so-called "Freedom Convoy" activity in the country is one of the most visible signs of where conservatism in Canada is heading, and I find my hopeful side looking in Peter McKay's direction as one of the least objectionable replacements. Any thoughts?
posted by elkevelvet at 11:24 AM PST - 185 comments

"Early tomorrow morning we'll hit 2:02:02 2-02-'02." -- posted by mrbula, February 1, 2002 [more inside]
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 10:49 AM PST - 23 comments

After 87 years with its former name and two years as the Washington Football Team, the franchise announced Wednesday morning that its new name would be the Commanders. The team also unveiled its new logo and uniforms.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:44 AM PST - 108 comments

"I am a fan of the illustrated posters that used to be the staple of nearly every science fiction and horror film released. These posters are able to communicate so much about a film with a single, masterfully created image that it’s a shame this style isn’t so popular nowadays."
100 Illustrated Horror Film Posters: Part 1 and Part 2 [more inside]
posted by churl at 10:38 AM PST - 16 comments

Brian Flores is a former coach for the New England Patriots and the recently fired coach of the Miami Dolphins. In 2019, Flores interviewed for the Denver Broncos HC job. He's alleging that he was never a serious candidate and only interviewed to meet the requirements of the Rooney Rule, which stipulated that teams have to interview minority candidates for HC jobs. He's alleging that the interview team for the Broncos, including Joh Elway, showed up late and drunk/hung over to his interview. [more inside]
posted by 47WaysToLeaveYourLover at 10:24 AM PST - 23 comments

"For while the Union side was fighting to end slavery, the coffee that it gulped down was the product of a South American plantation system as brutal as anything you might find in the cotton fields of Mississippi." "Hill had picked up the Manchester men’s trick of using hunger to lick a workforce into shape... [he] ruthlessly uprooted any other food stuffs that sprung up accidentally among his coffee trees – self-seeding tomatoes, avocados, plantains and figs – to ensure that no one managed to assuage their hunger on the sly." A review of Coffeeland by Augustine Sedgewick. A chat with Augustine Sedgewick. [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 10:16 AM PST - 7 comments

Netrunner was flatlined, but the game is still thriving under the stewardship of a fan-run volunteer collective. [more inside]
posted by okonomichiyaki at 10:05 AM PST - 16 comments

It’s Groundhog Day, again! Did you mean: Groundhog Day? [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 7:34 AM PST - 16 comments

"The other day I was at the grocery store and the checker was unable to identify a portabello [sic] mushroom. And no, she wasn't new.." [more inside]
posted by RobinofFrocksley at 7:27 AM PST - 75 comments

This year's Canadian Groundhog Day ceremony was rife with death and coverup.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 6:55 AM PST - 24 comments

One author's experience with psychiatric medication as a tool to quell suffering. "Suffering is big and suffering is satisfying. When it’s a chronic condition, it’s simply always there, a vast scratchy blanket, and it will swaddle you up forever if you want it to. It feels meaningful when you’re in it. You’re afraid to leave and find out it wasn’t. But if you do, you know the truth you were so afraid of — it was just a waste. You knew it then and you know it now. All the time I spent running from medication was time I could have spent reading books, writing, making friends, going on long walks, developing hobbies, loving other people, relishing the taste of things — even being genuinely sad, one of the many feelings major depression, for me at least, completely blunts. That is the world where meaning is."
posted by MikeTheJanitor at 6:49 AM PST - 39 comments

Meet the Kovids. There are a lot of people in the world named Kovid, and the jokes are getting old. Archive link if you can't use WaPo.
posted by JanetLand at 6:31 AM PST - 9 comments

Starting twenty years ago this month, Wired magazine tapped a bevy of designers and artists in the tech field to craft detailed satirical visions of futuristic objects for a monthly showcase at the close of each issue. Following a brief hiatus in 2008, the exercise returned in crowdsourced form, asking readers to submit their ideas for a given theme and incorporating the best ones into the following month's edition. After disappearing five years later, a 2020 redesign evolved the concept once more, asking readers to share six-word headlines, Hemingway-style (or not), on an evocative near-future story. While the new-new FOUND doesn't appear to be going anywhere, why not take some time to enjoy the history of this whimsical feature than by taking a look back at the "compleat" archived run of the series courtesy of Stuart Candy, who personally scanned the gamut of it to make a thorough retrospective for his excellent blog The Sceptical Futuryst: 2002 - 2003 - 2004 - 2005 - 2006 - 2007 - 2008 - 2009 - 2010 - Candy tells his FOUND story. More: "FOUND: The Future of..." and FOUND Photoshop Contests (2008-2013) - Six-Word Stories archive (2020-present) - a direct-link index to more and better futures inside. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 6:23 AM PST - 11 comments

On February 1st, the Twitter account for the SCP Foundation, made an announcement [more inside]
posted by Ipsifendus at 5:35 AM PST - 24 comments

The new design of the Belgian passport, featuring local celebrities (SLYT)
posted by elgilito at 4:26 AM PST - 10 comments

Okuda Hiroko was a recent graduate from the Kunitachi College of Music in 1980 when she was hired by Casio, a calculator company who were developing musical keyboards. She was also a huge reggae fan, having done her thesis on the genre. Within her first year at Casio, she was assigned the task of developing the preset rhythm patterns for the new keyboards, including the MT-40, one of which, some years later, would end up being used in a Jamaican dancehall record named Under Mi Sleng Teng. In a recent interview, Okuda gives an oral history of the MT-40 Rock preset; saying that she was thinking in the direction of British rock she had been listening to, whilst conceding that she did try to create a bassline a reggae DJ could “toast” over, and recounting picking up Under Mi Sleng Teng after reading in Japan's Music Magazine that the preset she worked on had inspired a flood of new Jamaican music. [more inside]
posted by acb at 3:59 AM PST - 10 comments

Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses by James Joyce To celebrate one hundred years since Sylvia Beach, publisher and bookseller, published James Joyce’s ULYSSES, Hay Festival is partnering the iconic bookshop Shakespeare and Company, Paris, on a global read-along of the complete text to be released as a free podcast between the 100th anniversary of the publication on 2 February 2022 and Bloomsday on 16 June 2022. If you are planning to read the novel for the first time you can do no better than use ulyssesguide.com as your guide. The author of this website has also just published it as a book.
posted by night_train at 3:29 AM PST - 10 comments

Reviewed by Ethan Coen
posted by fizban at 2:51 AM PST - 15 comments

All the levels from Lode Runner and Championship Lode Runner, in your browser. GitHub, also has further documentation. (DoublesJubilee, Original from 2016)
posted by JHarris at 2:46 AM PST - 10 comments

Nowhere and Back Again is a series of essays by Christine Kelley on Tolkien’s Middle Earth, for the Eruditorum Press blog. Kelley uses the geography of Middle Earth as a jumping off point for reflections on Tolkien’s writings, e.g. Dorwinion and wine, the Southeast and racism and Lake-town and democracy. Kelley finished Book I, focusing on Mordor, last autumn, and is now in the middle of Book II, which explores Rhovanion, also known as Wilderland.
posted by Kattullus at 2:42 AM PST - 6 comments

Anglers in northern Ontario can rent a one-of-a kind fishing limo or Mercedes-Benz.
posted by Alex404 at 2:39 AM PST - 5 comments

Ryan Manning went to Whole Foods in Dedham, MA on Jan 4th, 2021 during a local mask mandate. He was told to mask up, the two local managers told him to mask up. He chose to leave the premises, summoned police and claimed his civil rights were being violated. They returned to the store, where he refused accommodations such as have someone shop for him, or taking a temperature check. He filed a lawsuit in May in the Federal District Court where he went "pro se" (representing himself) alleging eight different violations including "harassment", "false imprisonment", and "unlicensed practice of medicine". He cited his reason to not wear a mask as "masks are a part of satanic rituals" and "he cannot slowly commit suicide by lowering his immune system and depriving himself of oxygen". A decision was handed down in late January 2022.. [more inside]
posted by kschang at 11:19 PM PST - 54 comments

A superb amateur home movie in colour from August 1939, recording a trip north from London along the A1. (8:36 run time.) [more inside]
posted by maxwelton at 8:51 PM PST - 12 comments

Look, I can't argue. This guy has done research far deeper than anything I'll ever do, and his arguments are pretty convincing. If you're up for it, here is Twin Peaks ACTUALLY EXPLAINED (No, Really), a 4h34m deep dive into the background of, development of, intent of, history of, plot of, symbols of, philosophy of, and generally everything else of Twin Peaks, and it ends with a sort of really messy bow like you'd get from a gift wrap counter in a second rate shopping mall anchor store. BUT IT'S PRETTY AND IT WORKS. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 8:48 PM PST - 18 comments

Let Me Tell You About Homestuck
5 years.
7,000 pages.
13,000 panels.
700,000 words. [Approximately the length of the Bible.]
Over 3 hours of animation.
Over 23 hours of soundtrack.
15 separate games, in 3 unique styles.

PBS once called Homestuck the "Ulysses of the Internet". Its author, Andrew Hussie — who resembles Joyce in his impishness, stylistic maximalism, and fondness for disturbing smut — calls it "a story I've tried to make as much a pure expression of its medium as possible". It has become a cultural phenomenon, inspiring proms and dominating Amazon makeup reviews. But most importantly, it's a rollicking good read, equal parts slapstick and epic, bildungsroman and cultural commentary. [more inside]
posted by team lowkey at 7:46 PM PST - 10 comments

Back in 2004 I asked a question about murder. [more inside]
posted by ashbury at 7:13 PM PST - 36 comments

Every link of my first post from October 2002 has disappeared into the WWW's afterlife, with no revenants in sight. But fear not (or fear?): other repositories of Gothic ghoulishness have risen to take their place. [more inside]
posted by thomas j wise at 3:45 PM PST - 3 comments

Acclaimed director and video essayist Kogonada, has made his second film, After Yang. Following the festival hit Columbus, Kogonada has made a science fiction film starring Colin Farrell, Jodie Turner-Smith and Justin H. Min as the titular robot. Reviews have been very good.
posted by octothorpe at 3:19 PM PST - 7 comments

Civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer first learned that Black people had the right to vote in 1962 when she was already in her 40s. Two years later Hamer was delivering a fiery speech on voting rights and violence at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Her testimony was so powerful that Lyndon B. Johnson decided to interrupt her with an unplanned press conference of his own. Video conversation and print interview with Dr. Keisha Blain, author of the 2021 book Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America.
posted by spamandkimchi at 2:56 PM PST - 4 comments

It's a thread, it's free: it must be a Free Thread. We're up to five now! That's probably some sort of anniversary, we should exchange gifts but not like gifts gifts, nothing elaborate, let's not make it weird. Anyway, come on in and chat about the whoozit and whatsit. [more inside]
posted by cortex at 12:53 PM PST - 242 comments

An unknown photographer's work comes to light (WWTW Video Link) [more inside]
posted by zerobyproxy at 11:59 AM PST - 4 comments

Pumpkin Cowboy
posted by Going To Maine at 11:34 AM PST - 13 comments

For three years, musician Nick Cave has maintained a public correspondence with his fans called The Red Hand Files. There, he expounds openly, tenderly, and compassionately on a tremendous range of subjects, often difficult or controversial ones. On grieving the loss of loved ones. On the world being shit. On art and mental illness. On forgiving the unforgivable. On loneliness and vegetarianism. On exploring and transcending gender. On exorcism. On suffering and transmutation. On AI writing songs. On not-knowing and God. On the poetry of Lucille Clifton. And lastly, delightfully, on the two squirrels who are ruining his and his wife's life. [more inside]
posted by rorgy at 10:55 AM PST - 24 comments

Evolution of Horror is a podcast that explores the history of the horror genre by delving into particular sub-genres across multiple weeks. Each episode, host Mike Muncer is joined by a different guest: a critic, filmmaker or expert, to discuss a particular film in depth, to look at its place within a sub-genre and its impact and legacy on cinema history. [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:37 AM PST - 7 comments

Miss Aloha Hula 2011 Farewell Performance [more inside]
posted by dhruva at 7:55 AM PST - 9 comments

BabyMetal’s Headbanger!! (ヘドバンギャー!!) arranged for recorder quintet. (original, live, previously)
posted by Quasirandom at 7:41 AM PST - 4 comments

The Radical Woman Behind “Goodnight Moon” [The New Yorker; Archive] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 7:28 AM PST - 9 comments

A new Instagram by NYC photographer Nicolas Heller showcases all the discarded and hastily taped signs that keep New York limping along: plaintive, brusque, vengeful, funny, and surprising.
The Pandemic has been hard on us all, but You Need To Stop.
YOU'RE BEING SCAMMED.
Is your grandpa Jewish, single and looking for love?
Staff Only!

posted by Countess Elena at 6:10 AM PST - 31 comments

"The funnel-like device that is is shared by everyone using the urinal also proved not to be a popular feature. Because of those reasons, not more than 700 'She-inals' were sold before Urinette, the company that manufactured it, sold the manufacturing rights."

The Dairy Queen in Port Charlotte, FL. Thailand's Hat Noppharat Thara at Phi Phi Islands National Park. The Victorian fixtures at the pierhead at Rothesay, Isle of Bute. And the remaining Top Ten Urinals in the world. [more inside]
posted by youarenothere at 5:27 AM PST - 21 comments

Nearly 15 years after the first flyover, the uncontacted peoples of the Envira River land near the Peru-Brazil border, long endangered, find themselves under existential threat. Following the President Bolsonaro's brazen deregulation, intimidation of advocates, and appointment of a missionary to a key indigenous agency, the normally reclusive tribes have responded to deforestation pressure on their ancestral lands by sending desperate envoys to nearby villages -- first contacts that expose them not just to the COVID pandemic, but a whole raft of modern diseases they have no defense against. But even under risk of genocide, the people of these beleaguered tribes continue to help defend the critically important Amazon rainforest from external attack. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 5:00 AM PST - 1 comment

"Stewart built his reputation on using comedy to cut through the sanctimony of conventional journalism and politics to give his center-to-liberal audience the truth about the world. His was a coherent worldview: Politicians on both sides of the aisle are hypocrites corrupted by cash; everyone’s lying about their professed values but especially those idiots who aren’t even willing to follow the science; and the only rational response to all the dishonesty and stupidity of the world is to laugh at it. Yet in the aftermath of the Trump administration, it’s no longer clear that the liberal landscape Jon Stewart helped construct was an unalloyed good. Even more crucially, it’s not clear that his continued assertions that he was just a comedian who happened to tell jokes about politics were ever all that honest."
posted by 47WaysToLeaveYourLover at 2:16 AM PST - 147 comments