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Parachuting women have been around quite a while. The first link is heavy on European history, especially France. This next link is of Chinese women, although there is no info on whether these are real women or stylized artistic painting: Chinese women parachuters [more inside]
posted by MovableBookLady at 10:51 PM PST - 5 comments

The Estonian Academy of Arts continues to produce interesting site-specific installations in the nation’s remote and often extraordinary landscapes.
posted by curious nu at 9:21 PM PST - 6 comments

[NOT AN OBITUARY] Annie Nightingale, MBE, is an impressive woman who has made a lasting mark on British music, and she's still going strong. Starting as a journalist in the the 1960s and continuing into the 1970s, in a period that also overlapped with her start on the BBC, first as a panelist as a panelist on Juke Box Jury in 1963. When Annie joined BBC Radio 1 in 1970, already a respected music journalist, she was Britain's first female DJ. And she's still going, now with the distinction of being longest serving presenter on Radio 1. On radio and on TV, she has constantly evolved her musical tastes with the times. You can hear that to this day with BBC's (shallow) archive of recent Annie Nightingale Presents ... episodes. More celebrations of Ms. Nightingale below the break. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:08 PM PST - 12 comments

Easter bunnies are terrifying. Vintage bunnies, creepy bunnies, disturbing bunnies, scary bunnies. Even creepier in motion.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:08 PM PST - 27 comments

A long time back, Guy Steele gave a talk on which is best: small code that takes less time to learn or big code that does lots of things, or some third way. To make a point, he stuck to a rule in his talk. (A syllable is a bit of sound that mouth and tongue can say at one time. To define a word is to tell what it means.) To start, he would just say words of one syllable. When he wants to say a word of more length, he has to define it first. If you like code or words, you might like to watch his talk, or you can read the text, too. (There are some weird skips on the tape, so you might have to do both.) [CW: Steele opens his talk with binary, gender essentialist definitions of "woman" and "person".]
posted by Lirp at 6:52 PM PST - 32 comments

In the time that Stringfield lived, her lifestyle was utterly taboo; only ten years after white women gained the right to vote, she was breaking conventions by forging a wildly independent path as a Black woman. Ferrar notes in Iron and Air Magazine that “it takes tough mental grit—foresight, planning, and craftiness—to do what Bessie did in the Jim Crow era and get away with it.” - The Black Woman Who Biked Across the US Alone During the 1930s Jim Crow Era
posted by supercrayon at 6:37 PM PST - 9 comments

What a Life!: An Autobiography is a satirical work of fiction published in 1911 by Edward Verrall Lucas (Wikipedia) and George Morrow (Wikipedia). They created it by writing text fitted around illustrations from the catalogue of a department store, Whiteley's. The book tells the story of the narrator's childhood, his role in the Closure Castle jewel robbery and his love affairs. The book was shown in a 1936 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (PDF link to catalogue). [more inside]
posted by paduasoy at 5:33 PM PST - 7 comments

Aubrey Plaza made a half-hour ASMR video, and some of it is about killing Jerry from Parks And Rec. [more inside]
posted by roger ackroyd at 4:43 PM PST - 18 comments

Battleship Solitaire
posted by maggieb at 2:51 PM PST - 28 comments

The 2018 Hugo Award Finalists, via mefi's own John Scalzi who is nominated for The Collapsing Empire. [more inside]
posted by Artw at 1:20 PM PST - 58 comments

Symphonic and psychedelic pop band The Polyphonic Spree perhaps reached their zenith with their second album, 2004's Together We're Heavy. (It picks up where the first left off) Side A: Section 11 (A Long Day Continues/We Sound Amazed), Section 12 (Hold Me Now) [video] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 3:38 AM PST - 5 comments

Washington Post columnist Elizabeth Bruenig's husband Matt has never read or seen Harry Potter. Here, he tries to reconstruct what the story is about based on political journalism written using Harry Potter analogies. [more inside]
posted by Knappster at 11:10 PM PST - 31 comments

How nostalgia for white Christian America drove so many Americans to vote for Trump [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:09 PM PST - 63 comments

Hong Kong’s well-to-do families may be off brunching at dim sum, but here on the streets on a recent Sunday afternoon, it’s all adobo and bagoong.
posted by PussKillian at 7:29 PM PST - 10 comments

In Praise of Unfinished Novels
posted by Chrysostom at 6:44 PM PST - 4 comments

“Sonic has just arrived back after the events of Sonic Mania and Sonic Forces, but something is already amiss. What are the huge holes being dug in the ground? And why is Eggman already capturing more animals? The story begins here, with the first of five parts in: "Sonic Returns"!” [YouTube] [Part1]
posted by Fizz at 6:29 PM PST - 4 comments

An experienced hiker went missing in Joshua Tree and some are still looking for him. And there's new research on how the brain uses location The Brain's GPS
posted by MovableBookLady at 6:23 PM PST - 24 comments

... might well be a disaster.
posted by spaceburglar at 4:24 PM PST - 19 comments

Happy Passover! Liven up your Seder with these totally-not-creepy masks of the plagues. And because the tenth plague (💀) was the best, hand out some cute toys as visual aids. For those of us who might be unclear on just what this Passover thingy is, John Kasich explains.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 2:21 PM PST - 26 comments

40 comedies from the past 40 years that changed the way we talk from the WaPo. [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:18 PM PST - 124 comments

How does the Ocean's Trilogy hold up? (Fran Hoepfner, Bright Wall/Dark Room).
posted by sapagan at 1:43 PM PST - 30 comments

Why the music we loved as teenagers stays with us for life. Neuropsychologist Dr Catherine Loveday asked her friends for their ten favourite tunes and why they mattered. Unsurprisingly, everyone - including adventurous listeners - included music from their teenage years. She asked herself how this happens, and has teamed up with BBC Radio 3 to conduct an experiment to find out if the phenomenon occurs with classical music too.
posted by Devonian at 9:31 AM PST - 90 comments

In 2000, the hardcore band Cave In took a stylistic left turn, releasing their still-divisive second album, Jupiter. For some in their hardcore fan base the shift from the tried-and-true hardcore tropes of heavy riffs and screamy vocals to the prog metal characterized by heavy reverb, space-age delay and the pretty melodies of guitarist-turned-vocalist Steven Brodsky. The band's bassist, Caleb Scofield, passed away yesterday.
Track list: Jupiter; In The Steam Of Commerce; Big Riff; Innuendo And Out The Other; Brain Candle; Requiem; Decay Of The Delay; New Moon [more inside]
posted by eustacescrubb at 9:21 AM PST - 10 comments

The strange story of Varosha, Cyprus, how one of the world's most popular tourist destinations became an empty, crumbling ruin overnight. Varosha was fenced off as a bargaining chip between Turkey and Greece in 1974, 35,000 residents left expecting a peace deal that never came. Twitter thread with history. Flickr album by Paul Dobraszczyk. Previously.
posted by The Whelk at 8:59 AM PST - 13 comments

George Monbiot: How corporate dark money is taking power on both sides of the Atlantic (oped).
American democracy is sold to the highest bidder. Recent research has shown how campaign financing is skewing policy influence towards top earners.
We Need Bastiat's 'The Law' More than Ever. High school students in the United States are usually required to take a course in government where they learn about the structure of government but rarely discover the appropriate role of government or the justifiable limits for the use of force in our society.
(A little more about George)
posted by adamvasco at 8:41 AM PST - 21 comments

"On March 21st, New Yorker food correspondent Helen Rosner tweeted a photo of her pointing a Dyson Supersonic Hair Dryer at a raw chicken. She was trying to remove moisture and maximize the crispiness of the chicken skin before roasting it, and she wanted to share her snow day plans with her followers. But this story is not about chicken. Well, it’s kind of about chicken."
posted by everybody had matching towels at 8:31 AM PST - 73 comments

Gastrodiplomacy: the deliciously secret foreign influence we can all get behind
posted by scratch at 6:59 AM PST - 65 comments

The Meltdown bug makes system RAM externally readable (previously). The first two patches for the Meltdown bug in Windows 7 made system RAM externally read-writable. So install the third Windows 7 / Win Server 2008 patch for the Meltdown bug ASAP. [more inside]
posted by ardgedee at 5:12 AM PST - 23 comments

NHL rules require both teams to keep two goalies available for play. Teams keep a local beer-league player on hand to suit up and sit on the bench should one of their goalies be unavailable - and if that other goalie goes down, they get on the ice and play. The only time this has happened recently was for less than eight seconds in a 1-3 losing game with the Hurricanes on New Year's Eve, 2016, but that changed tonight when 36-year-old rec-league goalie Scott Foster suited up for the Chicago Blackhawks and went 7 for 7 against a playoffs-bound Winnipeg Jets.
posted by Punkey at 4:51 AM PST - 54 comments

Hell, it turns out, is not a fiery pit of eternal damnation. Neither does it involve varieties of extreme torment. Rather, the punishment for sinners upon death is simply that they disappear. [more inside]
posted by aqsakal at 1:26 AM PST - 84 comments

In this case, "Chant Traditionnel" is a catch all used by The Voice France on their YouTube channel to describe songs which are not the usual fare. [more inside]
posted by maxwelton at 12:35 AM PST - 4 comments

Folk, rock, Americana, and Celtic all run strongly through Carbon Leaf's first major label album (Vanguard) fifth studio album, 2004's Indian Summer. [ Ed. note:I saw this band in an 800 seat theater open for Blues Traveler touring for this album and they won the night. Followed them strongly since then.] CD Tracklisting: Life Less Ordinary, What About Everything?, Changeless [cuts off suddenly, album version not album length], This Is My Song!, Grey Sky Eyes, Raise The Roof, Paloma, One Prairie Outpost, Let Your Troubles Roll By, When I'm Alone, The Sea [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 10:10 PM PST - 10 comments

"I once saw a paper that had a 1,000-line C [program] that had less functionality than these two lines of AWK." via Ed's Twitter.
posted by jjray at 8:00 PM PST - 51 comments

The newest album by Beninese singer and activist Angélique Kidjo is a cover, in its entirety, of the Talking Heads' classic Remain in Light. Here's the video for "Born Under Punches", directed by the album's producer, Jeff Bhasker. Here's an article in Rolling Stone.
posted by hydrophonic at 7:09 PM PST - 41 comments

Great scene-setting trailer for the BBC Two adaptation of China Mieville's The City And The City. If you prefer live action to atmos, there's an equally promising one containing David Morrissey in a beard too.
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 6:32 PM PST - 24 comments

Bad iPhone notches are happening to good Android phones [The Verge] “It would be stating the obvious to say that this trend is not a good one. I’m absolutely of the belief that everyone, Apple included, copies or borrows ideas from everyone else in the mobile industry. This is a great way to see technical improvements disseminated across the market. But the problem with these notched screens on Android phones is that they’re purely cosmetic. [...] As every phone manufacturer pursues a minimalist design philosophy, a problem emerges of how to add charm, humanity, and character to devices that are becoming essentially just a big screen. Apple took the risky step of introducing its signature notch, and the positive response from iPhone X owners together with the industry reaction at MWC this week have vindicated that choice.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:16 PM PST - 61 comments

The Disturbing Secret Behind an Iconic Cartoon: Robyn Byrd and Katie Rice were teenage Ren & Stimpy fans who wanted to make cartoons. They say they were preyed upon by the creator of the show, John Kricfalusi, who admitted to having had a 16-year-old girlfriend when approached by BuzzFeed News. [cw: brief descriptions of sexual abuse and descriptions of graphic underage imagery] [more inside]
posted by Countess Elena at 3:08 PM PST - 80 comments

"Unlike the traditional bachelor party, whose stated allure is a final, debauched moment of release before settling into monogamy, the bachelorette party — at least in its contemporary iteration — offers a last chance to be a public center of attention in a socially acceptable way. Crucially, that unruly spectacle — the moment when you get to feel like Britney, or believe you can dance like Beyoncé — is a plane ride, a long drive, and a world away from your “normal” life. Some of what happens in Nashville stays on Instagram, but most of what happens gets mothballed in the memory of your friends as that weekend when shit got crazy."
posted by Lycaste at 2:59 PM PST - 26 comments

Building on an earlier hypothesis and using a new stratigraphic analysis of part of the Mediterranean seafloor, scientists have discovered new evidence which provides a convincing argument (and video!) for their their hypothesis about the Zanclean Flood, which rapidly refilled the Mediterranean over a mile-high waterfall and ended the Messinian Salinity Crisis. [more inside]
posted by fedward at 2:30 PM PST - 20 comments

Rapidly shrinking towns and cities across Japan are experiencing a population explosion. Not an explosion of humans, though. An explosion in wild boar numbers. In the best Japanese tradition, they are countering it with a robotic Super Monster Wolf!
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 1:47 PM PST - 24 comments

Emily Yoshida: What It’s Like to Watch Isle of Dogs As a Japanese Speaker.
posted by Think_Long at 1:12 PM PST - 53 comments

Anthony Ray Hinton was released in 2015 after serving 30 years for a crime he did not commit. During his time on death row he created a book club for death row inmates where books had never been allowed before.
posted by ShakeyJake at 12:56 PM PST - 8 comments

The Bottom Line One in three families can’t afford diapers. Why are they so expensive? A report by the Tampa Bay Times. [more inside]
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 11:58 AM PST - 48 comments

In the late 80s and early 90s, an idiosyncratic music scene arose in the town of Stourbridge, in the West Midlands. Named grebo (after a local slang word for a scruffy layabout, taken from the dress sense of the artists), it combining punk rock guitars with electronic beats and hip-hop-influenced sampling, counted among its number bands such as The Wonder Stuff, Ned's Atomic Dustbin and Pop Will Eat Itself, and, for a moment, rivalled Britpop and Madchester/baggy as the next big sound of 90s UK indie. (SLGuardian)
posted by acb at 9:59 AM PST - 48 comments

“Some have turned federal informant. Others are facing prison time. More are named in looming lawsuits. All of them are fighting.“ The Alt-Right Is Having A Bad Month.

”Atomwaffen is an extremist group that received national attention after being implicated in five murders from May 2017 to January 2018. But even before the most recent slaying, Atomwaffen was under fire from others on the far right who claimed the group was actually a mouthpiece for the Order of Nine Angles, a satanic group that encourages members to infiltrate extremist political movements, whose members might be susceptible to conversion.” Satanism Drama Is Tearing Apart the Murderous Neo-Nazi Group Atomwaffen.” Kelly Weill (Daily Beast)
posted by The Whelk at 7:22 AM PST - 90 comments

Presenting the 2018 Name of the Year Bracket! 2017 saw Boats Botes crowned by the public, while the NOTY High Committee separately selected the (far-superior) Kobe Buffalomeat. Will Reality Winner take this year's top prize, or will Jimbob Ghostkeeper prevail? Voting starts soon. [more inside]
posted by alleycat01 at 7:13 AM PST - 54 comments

They laid the foundation: Jean Wells. Penny Williams. Darlene. Alice (Andre) Norton. Rose Estes. And more, of course, like Margaret Weiss and Jean Black.
posted by MovableBookLady at 7:11 AM PST - 16 comments

For the past six weeks the island of Ireland has been gripped by the proceedings at a Belfast rape trial, where two of the accused were players on the Irish rugby team. After 42 days, 30 witnesses, two snow storms, one Six Nations and three hours and 40 minutes of jury deliberations, the accused were acquitted on all counts. The verdict has stirred a strong response both on social media and with protests taking place around the country. [Whole post CW for sexual assault] [more inside]
posted by roolya_boolya at 6:27 AM PST - 27 comments

On April 1, Jesus Christ Superstar will be the latest (but not the last) musical to be performed live on broadcast TV in the U.S., but how the hell did the last week in the life of Jesus get to be an international mega-hit rock opera? It all started with Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, which launched a young Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice on the path of another biblical musical concept album set to more contemporary sounds and interwoven with modern themes. And then came the theater productions, the movie, and even more theater productions and tours.... [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 5:56 AM PST - 80 comments

Here's the 2018 Washington Post baseball quiz. Pretty fun even if they do misspell Roger Maris.
posted by JanetLand at 5:43 AM PST - 21 comments

Stratus is an interactive, collaborative and live piano installation at Harpa Concert Hall in Reykjavik for Piano Day. Created by musicians Ólafur Arnalds & Halldór Eldjárn, Stratus allows people from all over the world influence the intensity and complexity of music being played by two self-playing pianos.
posted by noneuclidean at 4:00 AM PST - 2 comments

What it says on the tin. Well except for the fact that they are using classroom instruments.
posted by mumimor at 3:51 AM PST - 14 comments

Reading the magazine feels like watching a wall of YouTube videos inside a Claire’s jewelry store while a tween-age life-style coach screams at you to double your net worth. The Very Unnerving Existence of Teen Boss, a Magazine for Girls. A Close Reading of Teen Boss Magazine, a Horrifying Artifact of Our Time
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:14 AM PST - 30 comments

Folk country troubadour Nanci Griffith's 1988 seventh album, One Fair Summer Evening, is a live acoustic recording from 1988 at Anderson Fair, Houston, Texas [YT album, 45m, YT playlist]. It's one of the most engaging things ever, IMO. Side A: Once In A Very Blue Moon; Looking For the Time (Workin' Girl); Deadwood, South Dakota; More Than A Whisper; I Would Bring You Ireland; Roseville Fair [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:18 PM PST - 15 comments

In an ongoing series, Disney Dan painstakingly documents the evolution of Disney theme park costumes: Mickey, Donald, Pluto, Minnie, Goofy, Dumbo, Chip & Dale, Daisy, Winnie, Pinocchio, Tigger, and Peter Pan.
posted by theodolite at 8:34 PM PST - 9 comments

“Anna started posting on Facebook about abortion, looking for direction. Eventually, a friend reached out to her, offering to introduce her to a woman named Natalie. The two talked on the phone. Anna admired how Natalie spoke with such authority and openness. Natalie liked how casually smart Anna was, how she connected reproductive health care to social justice. After several calls, Natalie told Anna about a side of her life she hadn’t yet shared: She was helping with a workshop on how to provide home abortions. Anna was welcome to attend. She just had to keep it a secret.” A secret network of women is working outside the law and the medical establishment to provide safe, cheap home abortions.
posted by Grandysaur at 8:04 PM PST - 32 comments

Every video’s title is “ohoho.” Ohoho. [YouTube] “YouTuber Ohohojousamahas been meticulously collecting anime clips of women saying “ohoho” for five years. Why? This is the internet. Don’t ask questions. Also known as the “noblewoman’s laugh,” “ohoho” in anime is an expression of amusement and condescension. In practice, it’s a shrill, “oh ho ho oh ho.” Didn’t know some basic shit? Ohoho. Let me explain. Beaten in a fight? Ohoho. You’re weak. Trying to cop a date with the cutest girl in your class? Ohoho. You wish.” [via: Kotaku]
posted by Fizz at 4:43 PM PST - 21 comments

Pro-vegan activists have been organising protests outside Antler, a Toronto restaurant with a focus on foraged/wild ingredients, since December. (Apparently it all started with a joke about kale on the restaurant's sidewalk chalkboard.) Last Friday, Antler's head chef, Michael Hunter, responded to the protests by butchering and then eating a venison steak in the window behind said protesters. Antler had previously attempted to placate the protesters by adding more vegan dishes to the menu, but protesters have stated their goal is to show that 'ethical meat' is a fake idea and/or to push the restaurant to go all-vegan.
posted by halation at 3:15 PM PST - 258 comments

In October 2006, progressive heavy metal band Queensrÿche appeared for a three night stint at The Moore Theatre in their hometown of Seattle. Each night, they played their bestselling album Operation Mindcrime and its new sequel, Operation Mindcrime II in their entirety, as one extended rock opera. Mindcrime at the Moore, Part 1 / Part 2. Includes explicit, nsfw lyrics. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 2:59 PM PST - 15 comments

In the next few days Tiangong-1, China's orbiting space station, (previously, previously, previously) will have an uncontrolled re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. "It's not supposed to happen like this." You can track Tiangong-1's progress here.
posted by runcibleshaw at 12:56 PM PST - 60 comments

Recently, The Atlantic announced that they had hired Kevin Williamson, a conservative pundit with some rather extreme positions. The response was quick, with people questioning why The Atlantic would hire a writer with such bigoted views. In response to this, editor Jeffrey Goldberg issued a memo to staff pointing out that this was done to expand the voices heard and challenge people, an argument that has also come under further criticism. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:01 PM PST - 109 comments

"It helped that the wasting away of tuberculosis sufferers aligned with existing ideas of attractiveness. The thinness, the ghostly pallor that brought out the veins, the rosy cheeks, sparkling eyes, and red lips (really signs of a constant low-grade fever), were both the ideals of beauty for a proper lady, and the appearance of a consumptive on their deathbed. If you didn’t have the disease, you could use makeup to get the pale skin and crimson lips, and wear a dress that slumped your posture." How Tuberculosis Symptoms Became Ideals of Beauty in the 19th Century
posted by everybody had matching towels at 10:54 AM PST - 31 comments

Toilet Ov Hell - Rock Against Anything: How Metal Became So Fucking Reactionary and What to Do About It
Noisey - A Brief But Very Informative History of How Fascists Infiltrated Punk and Metal
posted by Existential Dread at 10:42 AM PST - 22 comments

Who Does She Think She Is? The internet does not hate women. The internet doesn’t hate anyone, because the internet, being an inanimate network, lacks the capacity to hold any opinion whatsoever. People hate women, and the internet allows them to do it faster, harder, and with impunity.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 9:14 AM PST - 48 comments

Many people are unaware of ex-Eastenders actor Steve McFadden's role in the Cold War. He continues his efforts in international diplomacy still, holding regular meetings with Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, amongst others.
posted by fatfrank at 9:00 AM PST - 5 comments

Jay Foreman asks: Why isn't Cycling Normal in London? [SLYT] [11:00] [with subtitles] [more inside]
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 8:42 AM PST - 15 comments

"A little boy might write about sperm in the gutter -- you just don't know." Listening to Jethro Tull's Thick As A Brick Album For The First Time [more inside]
posted by philip-random at 8:21 AM PST - 61 comments

Federal circuit sends Oracle v. Google back for a third trial. As the inimitable Sarah Jeong puts it, "Isn't that nice." [more inside]
posted by seyirci at 7:54 AM PST - 19 comments

It turns out that, yes, the number of cheeses a country makes correlates with political instability. The EU cheese stability index from Politico
posted by chavenet at 5:43 AM PST - 44 comments

Want to freak yourself out? I'm gonna show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it Big Data exposeur Dylan Curran shows us just how much is out there. TL;DR- it's worse than you thought.
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 3:02 AM PST - 101 comments

"A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science, and Spirituality is a 2000 book by Ken Wilber detailing the author's approach to building a conceptual model of the World that encompasses both its physical and spiritual dimensions, positing a unified ground-of-everything, describing associated physical and mental development and the practical applications of this philosophy to business, education, medicine, ecology, and war. Cloud Atlas’s Theory of Everything. Lana Wachowski, Writer/Director of “The Matrix,” Interviews Ken Wilber about Brief History. The Many Meanings of The Matrix.
posted by spaceburglar at 10:54 PM PST - 27 comments

Dr. Neil Theise (@neiltheise), a liver pathologist, panpsychist, and Jewish Buddhist, published a paper today in which he and his collaborators announced the discovery of an entirely new human organ, the "Interstitium."
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:36 PM PST - 38 comments

Directed over 700 films (only 350 survive), wrote them, cast them, built her own studio. Started in France, consorted with the Lumiere brothers, built her studio in New Jersey (Solax, sold in 1922). Very successful early on but not accorded much status once Hollywood got going.
posted by MovableBookLady at 9:32 PM PST - 6 comments

If black Americans recognized the dangers of Fascism abroad early, it was because they knew it all too well in its American guise. They saw Mussolini’s Blackshirts reflected in the white hoods of the Klan, and Hitler’s Jew-baiting mirrored by the systematic violence of Jim Crow. While much of the world slept, they fought Fascists in the streets of Jersey City, in the Ethiopian sky, and in the dirt of the Jarama Valley... Black Americans saw the clear line that led from the horrors of European imperialism to the puffed-up violence of a Mussolini, and they would not allow Il Duce to swallow the cultured, defiant, and ancient country that they admired. Langston Hughes captured the sentiment in “Ballad of Ethiopia”: “All you colored peoples/ Be a man at last/ Say to Mussolini/ No! You shall not pass.”
posted by ChuraChura at 8:02 PM PST - 8 comments

“...the United States boasts more than 50,000 facilities and roughly 2.311 billion square feet of rentable space. In other words, the volume of self-storage units in the country could fill the Hoover Dam with old clothing, skis, and keepsakes more than 26 times.” — Self-storage: How warehouses for personal junk became a $38 billion industry (Patrick Sisson, Curbed)
posted by Room 641-A at 7:29 PM PST - 71 comments

My naym is pome / and lo my form is fix’d
Tho peepel say / that structure is a jail
I am my best / when formats are not mix’d
Wen poits play / subversions often fail
…

[more inside]
posted by Lexica at 6:36 PM PST - 11 comments

China Is Building a Rain-Making System Three Times as Big as Spain, “Modifying the weather in Tibet is a critical innovation to solve China’s water shortage problem.”
The system could increase the water supply by five to 10 billion cubic meters a year which will help China’s acute water shortage which imperils its economic future.
China Water Crisis The big picture.
posted by adamvasco at 5:11 PM PST - 23 comments

Former NHL goaltender Clint Malarchuk opens up in the Players' Tribune [warning: graphic descriptions of injury] about PTSD and mental illness.
posted by adamcarson at 5:07 PM PST - 13 comments

"It is perverse to make people participate in an institution they deplore in order to access resources that should be guaranteed to all." Eli Massey and Yasmin Nair discuss whether trans inclusion in the military is worth fighting for, and why the "gay non-profit industrial complex" is suddenly taking on the issue of trans rights.
posted by AFABulous at 4:15 PM PST - 52 comments

Has 'Tomb Raider' Broken the Video Game Movie Curse? [The Hollywood Reporter] “The new Tomb Raider currently sits at 49 50 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, which isn't enough to earn a "Fresh" rating, but the score does make it the most positively reviewed live-action video game adaptation of all time (the top rating of 50 percent goes to last year's animated Japanese release Resident Evil: Vendetta). In fact, only four other video game films even crack 40 percent on the site: 2017's Pokemon: I Choose You! (43 percent), 2016's The Angry Birds Movie (44 percent), 2001's Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (45 percent) and the aforementioned Resident Evil: Vendetta — making Tomb Raider a clear standout in the genre. Other than Jolie's Lara Croft, commercially successful video game film adaptations are few and far between, with the Resident Evil franchise being the notable exception, having made over $1 billion at the global box office over the last decade and a half. Only two video game films in history have managed to cross the $100 million mark domestically, Jolie's Tomb Raider and Angry Birds, while films like Assassin's Creed and 2016's Warcraft failed to make back even half of their production budget at the domestic box office.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 3:46 PM PST - 42 comments

"If we can only ever wake up on rare and seemingly miraculous worlds—and it’s a big enough universe—we shouldn’t be surprised to find our past filled with miracles."

Peter Brannen writes about observer selection, our "anthropic shadow" and much more.
posted by mahershalal at 3:15 PM PST - 10 comments

Learn how to eyeball 1 pound of carrots, onions, apples, grapes, broccoli, and other produce. [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 2:12 PM PST - 38 comments

Firefox announces their new Facebook Container Extension (FF Blog), a special Firefox mode which will isolate Facebook browsing from the rest of your browser history, cookies and identities. Firefox also promises that they don't track anything in the extension either. [more inside]
posted by bonehead at 1:32 PM PST - 35 comments

Sean Penn The Novelist Must Be Stopped [Claire Fallon, Huffington Post]

It doesn’t seem quite possible that a human person wrote this mess. In part, this is because Penn has certain overwhelming tics that seem like the product of a flawed algorithm rather than a conscious choice. For example, alliteration. Penn’s penchant for alliteration is so marked that I wondered, at times, whether he thought it was a prerequisite of the novel form [...] A few samples:

“Bob’s boyhood essence set him up for a separation from time, synergy, and social mores, leading him to acts of indelicacy, wounding words, and woeful whimsy that he himself would come to dread.” ― page 12

“Silly questions of cherries saved served to sever any last impression Bob might have had of Spurley as a serious citizen.” ― page 94

“There is pride to be had where the prejudicial is practiced with precision in the trenchant triage of tactile terminations.” ― page 125

[more inside]
posted by Atom Eyes at 1:31 PM PST - 102 comments

The Edge of Identity by Rachel Aviv for the New Yorker is a long article about Hannah Upp, a woman who disappeared in New York City in 2008 and was found twenty days later, having wandered the city in a fugue state. Aviv tells the story of Upp's life, before and since, and explores the science and history of dissociative amnesia.
posted by Kattullus at 12:59 PM PST - 15 comments

With only 3 days left to resigister to vote in the NYS Democratic primaries, the focus is on voting out members of the IDC, the ‘Independant Democratic Conference’ a breakway group of Democrats that vote with Republicans. Nearly all have a primary challenger this year with endorsements allready falling in thier favor. Robert Jackson and Jessica Ramos Talk about primarying thier IDC opponents, rent regulation, and worker protection. (City Limits) Second IDC challenger wants to be New York’s first transgender state senator. (City and State). Even established Dem seats aren’t safe: Meet Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the candidate who wants to defund ICE, bring Medicare For All, and unseat Joe Crowley (Splinter).

Meanwhile, on the heels of scandals, gaffes, and no-shows, Gov. Andrew Cuomo finds himself facing a challenger in actress/activist Cynthia Nixon. “A real Democrat doesn’t slash taxes on the wealthy. A real Democrat doesn’t slash corporate taxes. A real Democrat doesn’t give away billions of dollars in economic development money to his cronies and his donors with no strings attached.” (Glamour)
posted by The Whelk at 11:44 AM PST - 97 comments

Because I am quiet. Because you are dying. Because it is night. Because the stars are out. Because fathers die. Because I will miss your hands. Because I will miss Niners games on Sundays. Because we still have more books to read. Because my son doesn't really know you. Because memories fade. Because memories lie. Because fuck memories. Because cancer. Because cancer is not capitalized. Because Tracy Chapman songs. Because the Bee Gees. Because cassette tapes in your green car with the rotten banana peels on the floor. Because you let me sing. Because you told me I was your favorite even when it wasn't true. Because I was nine. Because I was sad. Because I was always sad. Because swim meets and tap recitals and science fair projects. Because popcorn in olive oil. Because walks by the ocean. Because you let me put my skates on. Because you didn't spank us even when she wanted you to. Because Neil Diamond said turn on your heartlight. Because what is heartlight? Because I am your daughter. Because you are so thirsty. Because the doctors say no water. Because fluid in your lungs. Because cancer. Because cancer is not capitalized... Maybe Something by Tamuira Reid
posted by not_the_water at 11:38 AM PST - 11 comments

55 Essential Space Operas from the Last 70 Years
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 9:40 AM PST - 117 comments

On Tuesday, March 20, a user on Reddit posted to the subforum of a popular video game: "My wife is a therapist. After I kept complaining about Overwatch losses, she made me fill out this worksheet." Even though this was posted as a “humor” item, the comments section abounded with a (perhaps surprising) amount of gamers earnestly embracing the worksheet as a tool for reflection. Commenters identified with the checklist of cognitive distortions. Some said that they would try to use this approach in other parts of their life that cause frustration.
posted by Ragini at 7:34 AM PST - 70 comments

Watch Geoff Marshall, of tube challenge and all the stations fame, doing a spot of tube-related stand up comedy. [more inside]
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 7:11 AM PST - 2 comments

Some guy in Japan has uploaded two videos that offered up a clever way to combine nudity and pendulums to create something utterly delightful (NSFW). [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:09 PM PST - 36 comments

Time Magazine has an excerpt from Professor Safiya Umoja Noble, author of Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. In looking at Google, Noble finds that, "What we know about Google’s responses to racial stereotyping in its products is that it typically denies responsibility or intent to harm, but then it is able to “tweak” or “fix” these aberrations or “glitches” in its systems." [more inside]
posted by TwoStride at 7:44 PM PST - 33 comments

Brett Easton Ellis is not a big fan of 21st Century cinema, but Peter Bradshaw is. Here's why the 2000s is his favourite film decade. Here's a bonus round from the BBC that you've probably seen before. And one response to that.
posted by spaceburglar at 5:38 PM PST - 34 comments

She Likes Her Eggs Cooked Over a Fire. He Might Not: When the chef Alice Waters used an iron egg spoon on “60 Minutes,” she touched off a tempest that still resounds with charges of elitism and sexism. (SLNYT by Kim Severson)
posted by crazy with stars at 4:24 PM PST - 226 comments

We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads. Zeynep Tufekci analyzes the state of advertising in social media. TL;DR imgur gif.
posted by loquacious at 4:22 PM PST - 59 comments

Remington Outdoor, manufacturer of the Bushmaster rifle that was used in Sandy Hook, has filed for Chapter 11.[Guardian] This is being blamed on the Trump Slump[NPR], a drop-off in arms purchases when a Republican is President. (Not to be confused with the Trump Slump in the general economy[Economist].) [more inside]
posted by CCBC at 4:21 PM PST - 26 comments

Pour une poignée de girolles is an animated student film from Julien Grande. It's about cooking, family, and hunting for mushrooms. It might brighten your day a bit.
posted by SageLeVoid at 3:54 PM PST - 3 comments

It is impossible to be constantly happy It seems the brain, the way it analyzes the data of what was, what is and what’s to come affects the proteins and in effect, the travel of sodium ions into a neuron will shut down a pathway (which may be towards happiness.)
posted by Yellow at 2:54 PM PST - 39 comments

The stabbing and burning death of 85-year-old Holocaust survivor Meirelle Knoll in her Paris apartment adds to growing concerns of a new wave of antisemitism in France.

“There are two contradictory elements here,” Bernard-Henri Lévy, the prominent French writer active in Jewish causes, said in an interview. “One the one hand, it’s true that Republican institutions are exemplary and do everything they can in the face of a rising anti-Semitism. But on the other, I am obligated to say that Jews are again being killed on the streets of Paris by virtue of being Jewish.”

posted by non canadian guy at 1:17 PM PST - 35 comments

A Political History of the Future: Iain M. Banks, Abigail Nussbaum at Lawyers, Guns and Money [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:06 PM PST - 28 comments

The Odds is a Canadian pop/rock band. Their most popular album (so far!) is "Good Weird Feeling." It's pretty okay! Side A: Truth Untold; Smokescreen (Come and Get Me); Radios Of Heaven; I Would Be Your Man; Satisfied; Break The Bed; Oh Sorrow, Oh Shame. [more inside]
posted by logicpunk at 12:59 PM PST - 22 comments

Far Cry 5: cults, chaos and all-American silliness [The Guardian] “It’s emotionally confusing to be buffeted constantly between tense sadism and tongue-in-cheek tomfoolery. Far Cry 5 doesn’t succeed in reconciling these two sides of its personality, but then it doesn’t really try. This is a game in which you will be listening to lurid descriptions of cannibalism and torture on one mission, then tearing down a highway in a monster truck with mounted machine guns the next. To enjoy it, you have to inoculate yourself against these sudden changes in mood. Far Cry 5 is most enjoyable when it embraces the chaos that ensues when a player is left on an island full of hostile cultists with enough guns to embarrass John McClane.” [YouTube][Launch Trailer] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 12:01 PM PST - 48 comments

"What the rise of Nazism looked like in Baltimore during the 1930s"
posted by josher71 at 11:06 AM PST - 12 comments

Jalopnik Movie Club is back. This week, we’re reviewing Smokey And The Bandit, a movie about beer and Pontiac. Jalopnik, of course, will talk more about the vehicles than the people, but that's okay because all the vehicles have people in them (except the smashed ones, vehicles, that is, not people). And the comments are good, too.
posted by MovableBookLady at 9:53 AM PST - 53 comments

“Today, 247,977 units — more than 11% of all rental apartments in New York City — sit either empty or scarcely occupied, even as many New Yorkers struggle to find an apartment they can afford.“ The Vacant City. “Submitting false documents to the city’s Department of Buildings for construction permits is a misdemeanor, which can carry fines of up to $25,000,” the AP notes. “But real estate experts say it is often flouted with little to no consequences. Landlords who do so get off with no more than a demand from the city, sometimes a year or more later, to file an ‘amended’ form with the correct numbers.” Jared Kushner lied to NYC because he could get away with it - very few consequences for landlords breaking the law. Mayor de Blasio’s plan doesn’t go far enough to help says Coalition For The Homeless, others.
posted by The Whelk at 9:34 AM PST - 66 comments

According to the [New Orleans] Saints’ handbook for cheerleaders, as well as internal emails and text messages reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with Davis, the Saints have an anti-fraternization policy that requires cheerleaders to avoid contact with players, in person or online, even though players are not penalized for pursuing such engagement with cheerleaders. The cheerleaders must block players from following them on social media and cannot post photos of themselves in Saints gear, denying them the chance to market themselves. The players are not required to do any of these things.

Cheerleaders are told not to dine in the same restaurant as players, or speak to them in any detail. If a Saints cheerleader enters a restaurant and a player is already there, she must leave. If a cheerleader is in a restaurant and a player arrives afterward, she must leave.

How an Instagram Post Led to an N.F.L. Cheerleader’s Discrimination Case [Ken Belson, The New York Times]
posted by Atom Eyes at 9:26 AM PST - 28 comments

"Some people are better at being themselves than others are. They're the ones at home instantly in any untried environment, the way a cloud looks just right no matter where it is in the sky. They seem to keep slightly better rhythm with the beat of the universe than other people—noticing things faster, making connections more quickly. They're people like Tiffany Haddish, who has been on this whale-watching expedition for ten minutes and is already its undisputed captain—a turn of events no doubt surprising to the disputed captain, i.e., the man commanding the vessel and ostensibly hired to lead the tour. Gleeful in mutiny, Haddish's fellow passengers beseech her to hijack microphone duties from Captain Nick. Only one or two of them recognize her as a professional comedian and newly minted movie star; to the majority of middle-aged white people on this boat, she is simply a confident woman with three free hours to search for whales off the coast of Los Angeles. A woman whose commentary they enjoy." There's Something Funny About Tiffany Haddish
posted by everybody had matching towels at 9:24 AM PST - 12 comments

You make clear that yoga classes and nap rooms won’t fix this. There’s data on this — there shouldn’t need to be, but there is — that suggests that when people come to work sick, they’re not as productive. Companies have problems with presenteeism — people physically on the job but not really paying attention to what they are doing — with lost workdays from psychological stress and illness, with high health care costs. Seven percent of people in one survey were hospitalized — hospitalized! — because of workplace stress; 50% had missed time at work because of stress. People are quitting their jobs because of stress. The business costs are enormous. [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 9:13 AM PST - 49 comments

Love, Simon has been getting a lot of attention for being the first wide release queer romcom aimed at a teen audience. Love, Simon is a groundbreaking gay movie. But do today's teens actually need it? [more inside]
posted by Automocar at 9:02 AM PST - 30 comments

Remember early game-and-utility-making program HyperCard (previously)? It's back. In in-browser form. Welcome to the return of anyone being able to make games and other stuff regardless of programming ability: ViperCard!
posted by BiggerJ at 5:39 AM PST - 28 comments

The problem with C.P. Snow’s famous two-cultures hypothesis (Kevin Berger, Nautilus).
posted by sapagan at 4:11 AM PST - 32 comments

Lou Engle: An American Threatens a Christian-Muslim Divide in Singapore Benjamin Lim investigates the inroads political American evangelicalism have made in his country as he attended the sixth annual Kingdom Invasion. [more inside]
posted by cendawanita at 12:10 AM PST - 28 comments

"Check, check, this is Radio Free Mars ... where I do my usual thing - do what I want, say what I want and play the music that I want, so f**k the frequency laws!" [YouTube playlist] Tune in for 45 minutes of downtempo, breakbeat, trip-hop and related remixes of The Seatbelts' soundtrack to Cowboy Bebop, with radio banter interludes written by Shinichiro Watanabe and Dai Sato, so it's "cannon" - if that means anything to you.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:15 PM PST - 12 comments

But the ultimate goal is artificial general intelligence, a self-teaching system that can outperform humans across a wide range of disciplines. Some scientists believe it’s 30 years away; others talk about centuries. This AI “takeoff,” also known as the singularity, will likely see AI pull even with human intelligence and then blow past it in a matter of days. Or hours. What Will Our Society Look Like When Artificial Intelligence Is Everywhere?
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 9:52 PM PST - 24 comments

In 1995, Karl Jenkins developed a language-free, yet sung, project called Adiemus that feels classical and also very modern. Adiemus is worth a listen. Cassette Side A:Adiemus, Tintnnnabulum, Cantus Inaequais, Cantus Insolitus, In Caelum Fero [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:11 PM PST - 11 comments

Pacific Rim: Amara, a collaboration between LINE Webtoon and Legendary Comics, (free to read here) is an official prequel to Pacific Rim Uprising that tells the origin story of Amara (played in Uprising by Cailee Spaeny). "As the Kaiju Wars rage on, Pacific Rim: Amara follows the young heroine whose life shattered when she is orphaned during a devastating monster attack. Fighting to survive as her city is destroyed, she finds shelter with a grumpy mech-inventor named Kai and his closest companion, Hannah. The trio forms an unlikely family in the aftermath of the invasion, looking out for one another and scavenging old mech parts to build their very own Jaeger, a pilotable giant robot with the power to protect Amara from the monsters that took everything from her." [more inside]
posted by womb of things to be and tomb of things that were at 7:59 PM PST - 6 comments

“Good evening. Thank you all for coming. I'll read a brief statement, and then I'll be happy to take your questions“ - a review of Pacific Rim - Uprising, a movie in which giant robots fight other giant robots and also monsters.
posted by Artw at 6:56 PM PST - 67 comments

Faculty of Horror is a podcast by Canadian journalists and academics Andrea Subissati (Sociology) and Alexandra West (Film Studies) that takes on horror films from a feminist angle. [more inside]
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:52 PM PST - 13 comments

Remember personal blogs? So does Dan Cohen: "There has been a recent movement to “re-decentralize” the web, returning our activities to sites like this one... However, I’m also a pragmatist, and I feel the re-decentralizers have underestimated what they are up against, which is partially about technology but mostly about human nature." He reflects on inertia, ambient humanity, and the challenges to a resurgence in personal blogging in this post, Back to the Blog. Via kottke.org.
posted by MonkeyToes at 3:05 PM PST - 90 comments

Rodney Barnette was under government surveillance for over 10 years. Now his daughter, Sadie, has turned his 500-page FBI file into art. [more inside]
posted by queen anne's remorse at 2:31 PM PST - 3 comments

Fiona Presly and bee behavior expert Lars Chittka wrote about Presly's pet wingless bumblebee [pdf] that she found last spring in her garden in Inverness. The Scotsman has an interview with them and The Dodo has a short account with many pictures.
posted by Kattullus at 1:01 PM PST - 21 comments

The Former Khmer Rouge Slave Who Blew the Whistle on Wells Fargo: A Wells Fargo call-center worker knew the bank was wrong. So he spoke up. (SLNYT by Emily Flitter)
posted by crazy with stars at 11:07 AM PST - 11 comments

Tucked between butchers and hair braiders in Nairobi’s Kenyatta Market is the Real Vinyl Guru, a shabby stall that has become a mecca for vinyl lovers.
posted by infini at 8:48 AM PST - 5 comments

A Japanese graphic designer has made it his life’s work to design an improbably realistic and detailed map of a city that doesn’t exist. [more inside]
posted by huimangm at 4:52 AM PST - 14 comments

Anatomy of a music video: Daniels - Turn Down for What (by DJ Snake & Lil Jon) (nsfw-ish) [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:21 AM PST - 22 comments

Nobody knows anything about China.
posted by storybored at 10:38 PM PST - 15 comments

Why We’re Underestimating American Collapse

Why? When we take a hard look at US collapse, we see a number of social pathologies on the rise. Not just any kind. Not even troubling, worrying, and dangerous ones. But strange and bizarre ones. Unique ones. Singular and gruesomely weird ones I’ve never really seen before, and outside of a dystopia written by Dickens and Orwell, nor have you, and neither has history. They suggest that whatever “numbers” we use to represent decline — shrinking real incomes, inequality, and so on —we are in fact grossly underestimating what pundits call the “human toll”, but which sensible human beings like you and I should simply think of as the overwhelming despair, rage, and anxiety of living in a collapsing society.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:12 PM PST - 162 comments

Are You Really in Love if It’s Not on Instagram? SLNYT
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 9:02 PM PST - 22 comments

Some Very Entertaining Plastic [Internet Archive Blog] “It’s been a little over 4 years since the Internet Archive started providing emulation in the browser from our software collection; millions of plays of games, utilities, and everything else that shows up on a screen have happened since then. While we continue to refine the technology (including adding Webassembly as an option for running the emulations), we also have tried to expand out to various platforms, computers, and anything else that we can, based on the work of the emulation community, especially the MAME Development Team. For a number of years, the MAME team has been moving towards emulating a class of hardware and software that, for some, stretches the bounds of what emulation can do, and we have now put up a collection of some of their efforts here at archive.org. Introducing the Handheld History Collection.” [via: Rock Paper Shotgun]
posted by Fizz at 9:00 PM PST - 32 comments

Number Systems of the World
posted by gwint at 7:20 PM PST - 12 comments

A consideration of Bowie as an actor.
posted by MovableBookLady at 6:32 PM PST - 22 comments

Working in a home studio by himself, Jean-Michel Jarre crafted 1976's synthesizer masterpiece, Oxygène [YT album, ~40m]. The sides on the vinyl are hard to break apart, so here it is as originally presented: Side 1 (Oxygène Part I, Oxygène Part II, Oxygène Part III), Side 2 (Oxygène Part IV, Oxygène Part V, Oxygène Part VI)
posted by hippybear at 6:28 PM PST - 28 comments

“Either you’re ruining my childhood or everything’s problematic.” Nat (AshesforFoxes), Erin (Holocroning), and Shi (Ohtze) are Three Harpies podcasting about genre fiction. Metamashina is hours of intelligent discussion about the female gaze, women's voices in SF fandom, leftism versus neoliberalism, the importance of domestic labor narratives, and femmebots in film. [Twitter] [Tumblr] [more inside]
posted by Kitty Stardust at 3:19 PM PST - 5 comments

Konnakkol is the Southern Indian art of percussive vocal performances, much like Scatting in American Jazz. Here's some really cool videos of people transcribing pieces for western drums!

• Konnakkol duet by V Shivapriya and B R Somashekar Jois, with Amir Oosman on quads. (contains transcript if you want to try and sing along)
• Drums and Konnakkol: Mayur G S
• Westerners Cain Daniel and Yogev Gabay give it a shot, another duet this time with a piece from the Karnataka College of Percussion in Bangalore, India

Not up to speed? Wondering about the (seemingly random) finger and hand tapping? B C Manjunath & Somashekar Jois have got you covered with a series of beginners lessons to konnakkol, in English! (link to first video in a youtube playlist)
posted by FirstMateKate at 2:54 PM PST - 19 comments

Sociologist Sharon Zukin spent a year observing hackathons and then wrote about it (paywalled article, Google Books preview) for Research in the Sociology of Work. Wired interviewed Zukin for their article Sociologists Examine Hackathons and See Exploitation. "Zukin tells WIRED the unpaid labor of hackathons recalls sociological research on fashion models, who are also expected to spend time promoting themselves on social media, and party girls, who go to nightclubs with male VIPs in hopes of boosting acting or modeling aspirations. Participants are combining self-investment with self-exploitation, she says. It’s rational given the demands of the modern labor market. It’s just precarious work."
posted by clawsoon at 11:19 AM PST - 40 comments

As it scrambled to compete in the internet world, the once-dominant tech company cut tens of thousands of U.S. workers, hitting its most senior employees hardest and flouting rules against age bias. (SLProPublica feature by Peter Gosselin and Ariana Tobin)
posted by crazy with stars at 10:34 AM PST - 59 comments

With #DeleteFacebook in full swing, is #DeleteTwitter far behind?

Launched on Nov 17th 2017, Counter.Social (aka: CoSo) describes itself as:

"The first Social Network Platform to take a zero-tolerance stance to hostile nations, bots and trolls weaponizing OUR social media platforms and freedoms..."

CoSo values community, discussion, kindness, integrity, and people before ideology.

And @realDonaldTrump is banned. Forever. [more inside]
posted by Skygazer at 9:08 AM PST - 101 comments

This new app is like Shazam for your nature photos. Using neural networks trained on the vast collection of photos posted to the iNaturalist app, Seek helps you identify local flora and fauna and learn more about them.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 8:45 AM PST - 29 comments

Inspiration for Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away (千と千尋の神隠し), and at 3000 years old, supposedly the oldest hot spring in Japan, Dogo Onsen resort is having another art festival, decorating hotel rooms and public spaces alike. Starting in 2014 with some dotty hotel rooms, courtesy Yayoi Kusama, Dogo Art this year features Shin Sobue's work of decorating a hotel room with the text of the novel Bocchan, by local boy done good, Natsume Soseki.
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 8:30 AM PST - 3 comments

How and why to search for young Einsteins Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), founded in 1971 ... recruited 5,000 precocious children, each of whom had intelligence-test scores in early adolescence high enough to gain entry to university. Research into how these children did in adulthood has emerged over the past two decades. Of the SMPY participants who scored among the top 0.5% for their age-group in maths and verbal tests, 30% went on to earn a doctorate, versus 1% of Americans as a whole. These children were also much more likely to have high incomes and to file patents.
posted by sammyo at 6:16 AM PST - 28 comments

Watch as a Saskatchewan woman saves the day for a perplexed porcupine. Feel your heart swell as an Ontario photographer shoots a very special wedding on 24-hour notice. Cringe as cars whiz by a Quebec Welcome Beaver (he isn't harmed). Finally, enjoy Canada.com's favourite cute animal pictures.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:24 PM PST - 27 comments

Why Democrats Should Embrace a Federal Jobs Guarantee

To explore the possibility of Democrats’ running on a guaranteed-job plan, we asked the respected data analytics firm Civis Analytics to not only poll guaranteed jobs, but poll it in the way that would be most likely to gain opposition from voters. They asked respondents: “Democrats in congress are proposing a bill which would guarantee a job to every American adult, with the government providing jobs for people who can’t find employment in the private sector. This would be paid for by a 5 percent income tax increase on those making over $200,000 per year. Would you be for or against this policy?”

"52 percent in support, 29 percent opposed, and the rest don’t know." [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:34 PM PST - 91 comments

In August 2016, a ten-year-old boy was decapitated while riding the tallest waterslide in the world, the Verrückt, at Schlitterbahn Waterpark in Kansas City, KS. The indictment has just been released, and it is damning. [more inside]
posted by vegartanipla at 9:09 PM PST - 109 comments

Day 248: Trump has, after much whining and the threat of a veto, signed the House spending bill, keeping the US government open until September. Early reports (because, of course, it was put together and shoved through in a rush) are that it's not great, with way too much irresponsible spending on the military, but it's much better than could be expected given this administration. A policy solution for DREAMers is not included, which Trump tried to blame on Democrats, leading to Trump supporters confusingly calling for American residents who aren't citizens to be looked after by the government. [This is an American politics thread: to keep it manageable for mods, please read and abide by these instructions.] [more inside]
posted by Merus at 7:59 PM PST - 2125 comments

Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner // Supercut [YouTube]
posted by Fizz at 6:24 PM PST - 3 comments

After 3 years out of the public eye, Dixie Chicks released their seventh album in 2006, Taking The Long Way. It was quite a statement after what they'd been through during and after their 2003 European tour. It won numerous awards, including Grammys and a Juno for International Album Of The Year. CD tracklist: The Long Way Around, Easy Silence, Not Ready To Make Nice [video, Ed. Note: OMG THIS VIDEO], Everybody Knows, Bitter End, Lullaby, Lubbock Or Leave It, Silent House, Favorite Year, Voice Inside My Head, I Like It, Baby Hold On, So Hard, I Hope
posted by hippybear at 6:18 PM PST - 15 comments

Tien Nguyen, Katherine Spiers, and LA Taco protest the embattled LA Weekly’s annual Essential 99 list of restaurants: The last year hasn’t been a great one for many of our local media institutions. With the fragility of those institutions in mind, we didn’t want such a vital list to disappear. In the spirit of the first one, we decided this year to create our own. As with the original, the Rogue 99 is intended to be a guide to the culinary soul of the city. It is not, to be clear, a list of the “best restaurants” in Los Angeles; rather, it’s a showcase of places to eat if you want to be fluent in the language of Los Angeles. These are restaurants, taco stands, and food carts that have been the lifeblood of the city and the county for at least a year, if not considerably longer.
posted by Room 641-A at 4:48 PM PST - 14 comments

Adult Swim has dropped the longform trailer for the upcoming new FLCL seasons - FLCL Progressive and FLCL Alternative, with clips from the new themes by The Pillows. (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:10 PM PST - 19 comments

A really good interview about her current tour and coping with middle age. Here's a video of the kickoff of this tour: Constant Craving [more inside]
posted by MovableBookLady at 12:24 PM PST - 24 comments

What in God’s Name Happened to Ricky Gervais? A look at the decline of the once great comedian who has gone from creating The Office to having his own David Bowie song to reflexively defending shitposters online.
posted by Artw at 9:59 AM PST - 140 comments

"I've played a game of tag for 23 years" - now coming to a cinema near you.
posted by Stark at 8:55 AM PST - 27 comments

In "Philosophy of Science" Brett Hall provides a non-mathematical and jargon free summary of David Deutsch's 2016 paper "The Logic of Experimental Tests, Particularly of Everettian Quantum Theory". [more inside]
posted by Ipsifendus at 8:14 AM PST - 10 comments

With nationalism on the rise, we ask: can philosophy enable us to think differently about our true identity? Question everything.
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 8:10 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

Craigslist just got rid of its entire personals section, which was reportedly one of the most used parts of the site, thanks to a new law aimed at cracking down on sex trafficking. [more inside]
posted by MrVisible at 8:02 AM PST - 63 comments

UK Drama Pitch Generator By James Henry (Smack the Pony &c) via @calbo
posted by hawthorne at 6:08 AM PST - 18 comments

On March 10th 1964, Canadian TV viewers tuned to Quest, a show created to inform and entertain. Often controversial and never one to pull its punches, Quest had been branded 'corrupt and immoral' in Parliament. Facing cancellation, show producer Daryl Duke decided to go out with a bang: 27 minutes of nothing but Bob Dylan, his guitar and So. Much. Background smoking. [more inside]
posted by garius at 3:07 AM PST - 18 comments

When Aleksander Doba kayaked into the port in Le Conquet, France, on Sept. 3, 2017, he had just completed his third — and by far most dangerous — solo trans-Atlantic kayak trip. He was a few days shy of his 71st birthday. He was unaccustomed to wearing pants.

Alone at Sea by Elizabeth Weil (SL NYT) [more inside]
posted by lesser weasel at 1:06 AM PST - 12 comments

Please enjoy these videos of animals enjoying scritches: A tiger quoll | A birb | Jeddah the bat | A blind horse (reciprocal scritches!) | RonRon the fox | A teeny kitten | Marble the chinchilla | A cow | Max Lynx | and no post is complete without A dog.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:33 PM PST - 41 comments

Today is Damon Albarn's 50th birthday. You may know Damon from such bands as Blur and Gorillaz. Recently, Noel Gallagher has said that he wants Albarn to do a guest appearance on his next album, which isn't as odd as it might sound... [more inside]
posted by elsietheeel at 8:07 PM PST - 25 comments

Before there was the place where everybody knows your name, there was Park St. Under, an eerily similar local sitcom. Did it quietly serve as the basis for the most famous TV show about Boston ever made?
posted by retrograde at 6:47 PM PST - 21 comments

This week marks the 15th anniversary of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. But the U.S. has been waging war against the Iraqi people over the past six decades.
posted by spaceburglar at 5:54 PM PST - 17 comments

Steve Winwood's 1986 album Back In The High Life [full album, 45m] is one of those rare albums (in a family perhaps with Rumours) where every track is basically perfect (if you like this sort of thing). It won 3 Grammys, hit the top 20 (or higher) in 10 countries, and even hit slot 46 on the US R&B Hip-Hop Album chart. Side A>: Higher Love [video, DM link], Take It As It Comes, Freedom Overspill, Back In The High Life Again [video] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:53 PM PST - 45 comments

James L. Sutter, writer and game designer, critiques a map of New Orleans and surrounding area (SL Twitter).
posted by CheeseLouise at 1:39 PM PST - 30 comments

Inside the Story of America’s 19th-Century Opiate Addiction
This Isn't the First U.S. Opiate-Addiction Crisis - How drug companies triggered an opioid crisis a century ago [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:11 PM PST - 5 comments

These are men who are anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their place in the job market, and beset by racial fears… In fact, stockpiling guns seems to be a symptom of a much deeper crisis in meaning and purpose in their lives. Taken together, these studies describe a population that is struggling to find a new story—one in which they are once again the heroes.

"Why Are White Men Stockpiling Guns?"
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 11:01 AM PST - 176 comments

Seven pages of fabulous photos. The Bored Panda link gives you seven pages of large-scale photos. This next link is to the official Sony page which has galleries of the winners, but not as large as the BP ones. However, Sony has the info on the exhibition opening in April in London. Sony Photo Page
posted by MovableBookLady at 10:19 AM PST - 4 comments

“If you are seeking a sentence of 3 years incarceration, state on the record that the cost to the taxpayer will be $126,000.00 (3 x $42,000.00) if not more and explain why you believe the cost is justified.” Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner Leading A Criminal Justice Revolution (The Intercept). Inside The Fight Against Cash Bail, Meet The Advocates Working To End The Predatory Practice (Pacific Standard). A Billionare And A Nurse Shouldn't Pay The Same Fine For Speeding (NYT Opinion).
posted by The Whelk at 10:04 AM PST - 35 comments

"...these are the most curious pictures that can be found in the whole world..." A fascinating and discursive essay on Les songes drolatiques de Pantagruel, a 16th-century collection of enigmatic monsters.
posted by theodolite at 9:55 AM PST - 11 comments

Join standup legend Peter Kay as he presents all the lyrics you thought you heard, but possibly didn't. [SLYT] [NSFW] Today's chat powered post, thanks winterhill
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 7:58 AM PST - 82 comments

Wham!'s cover of The Sisters of Mercy's This Corrosion is perfectly wrong in every way. (slyt)
posted by Peter H at 7:44 AM PST - 44 comments

'Stoneage Romeos' was the debut album for the Hoodoo Gurus. An homage of sorts to Hammer's ridiculously camp caveman b-movie One Million Years BC, it hinted towards the elemental joys contained within: day-glo colours, menacing Tyrannosaurus rex, cowering cavewoman, and a band logo that looked as if it had been drawn on the back of an exercise book during a particularly dull double maths session on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. Its cover was alluring and a statement all in itself.
posted by h00py at 7:08 AM PST - 12 comments

How Fortnite became more popular than PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds [PCGamesN] “...the game’s true strength was found when Epic announced Fortnite Battle Royale in September 2017 - hot on the heels of the massively popular PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. The Battle Royale mode has become so popular since then that it is now the most streamed game on Twitch and the newly launched mobile version topped the iOS charts across 13 countries. Given the extraordinary success of Fortnite the fact that it is now attracting celebrities from outside of games towards its shrinking battle arenas is to be expected. It is not just Drake, either: international rugby players have imitated animations from the game during matches, and even Roseanne from the TV series Roseanne (yes, her) has caught the Fortnite fever.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:01 AM PST - 91 comments

The Atlantic recently published two very different tales of China: China’s New Frontiers in Dystopian Tech, where Facial-recognition technologies are proliferating, from airports to bathrooms, an article by Rami Niemi on how biometric identification is being used to shame jaywalkers and linking to the still-developing citizen scores (ACLU, 2015). Meanwhile, Murder Villages and Scam Towns are a reality in some rural areas, where crime has become a cottage industry. Robert Foyle Hunwick documents grim examples of corruption far from the big cities, including rural towns where individuals are murdered at work sites but made to look like industrial accidents, and other locals pose as grieving family members to get companies to pay out hush money.
posted by filthy light thief at 5:36 AM PST - 14 comments

"In 1993, the makers of The Killing Fields and Chariots of Fire bought the film rights to the world’s biggest video game. The result was a commercial disaster. But that’s only part of the story." The Stench Of It Stays With Everybody: Inside the Super Mario Bros Movie
posted by everybody had matching towels at 5:05 AM PST - 39 comments

Wilson, Keppel and their Betties: an article by Luke McKernan, about the once-renowned British music hall trio, including a number of video clips showing them in action. Elsewhere, Christopher Fowler writes that they "sounded like a firm of solicitors and looked like Egyptian hieroglyphs brought to life. They were the epitome of the bizarre speciality act..." Please note the videos linked from these pieces include potentially offensive content ranging from confusingly weird cultural misappropriation up to outright old-time racism. [more inside]
posted by misteraitch at 4:44 AM PST - 13 comments

So Barker stopped taking testosterone. He delayed an appointment to discuss a hysterectomy. Well, it was just a short film. Not too disruptive. But the filming went on and on – and Barker ended up telling a very different story to the one he planned. The pregnancy he chronicled was not Tracey’s, but his own. And it changed his sense of who he was.

The story of one man’s pregnancy: ‘It felt joyous, amazing and brilliant’.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:12 AM PST - 11 comments

2018 New Year Megamashup was I needed. A bit of fun to soften the day .
posted by CheapB at 11:50 PM PST - 2 comments

I've reimagined 1992's Utah Saints' eponymous debut album with companion EP Something Good to form a single album. I apologize for any offenses. Mythical Side A: Something Good [video], I Want You [video], Anything Can Happen [not available], What Can You Do For Me [video], Trance Atlantic Flight, Solution, States Of Mind [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:50 PM PST - 26 comments

Your oyster might come with a parasite that George Washington (maybe) endorsed - the pea crab.
posted by Chrysostom at 5:47 PM PST - 34 comments

My bike was stolen a week ago Saturday. It was half my fault, half my husband’s fault, and 100 percent the fault of the person who stole it. Left with a lock, a front wheel and a heavy heart, I did the only thing I could think of: I decided to leave the thief a little note. Okay, it was a big note. […] On Wednesday evening, I got the first knock on my door.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:08 PM PST - 42 comments

The beginning of the end of World War I. One hundred years ago today the German empire launched Operation Michael, a vast offensive aimed at cracking the Allied armies in France and winning the First World War. German forces, bolstered by armies freed up from the defeat of Russia's empire in the east, fought to win as much ground as possible before American armies arrived in strength. "Paris guns" lobbed giant shells into that city from 75 miles away. It was possibly the largest military attack in human history by that point. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 12:03 PM PST - 31 comments

How bomb debris from Bristol ended up in a road in Manhattan. How Sydney's Aboriginal people made tools from Thames flint. How Squirting Cucumbers came to grow on the banks of the Avon.
posted by Helga-woo at 10:47 AM PST - 17 comments

Games serve as curious records of 19th-century British beliefs and prejudices, reflecting the attitudes of a growing empire towards its own society as well as towards those beyond its border 50 examples, mostly from the 1800s, were recently compiled in a lavishly illustrated book published by Pointed Leaf Press, representing a half-century of this early social tradition in England.
posted by MovableBookLady at 10:00 AM PST - 17 comments

Honest Trailers presents Every Wes Anderson Movie. (slyt)
posted by fings at 9:49 AM PST - 83 comments

All the kinds of sax you've probably never ever seen before, and a huge, mammoth one. [SLYT][11:26] Today's post crowdlinked by mefichat. [more inside]
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 7:46 AM PST - 32 comments

"The Commotions had been a certain kind of pop band; a thoughtful pop band. I wanted to do everything the Commotions had not done; I wanted to make stupid rock 'n' roll or beautiful, almost, fleur bleue type music. The things someone in the band would have said no to were all the things I wanted to say yes to." [more inside]
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 7:38 AM PST - 9 comments

Natsume Sōseki: Japan’s Foremost Modern Novelist [Nippon] “Japan’s leading modern novelist Natsume Sōseki was born 150 years ago, on February 9, 1867. He passed away shortly before his fiftieth birthday, on December 9, 1916; last year Japan marked the centenary of his death. Despite their age, his works remain fresh and full of life for contemporary readers, and they have been translated into many languages. Having lived through a period when the country stepped onto the international stage, Sōseki could be described as Japan’s first writer of world literature.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:20 AM PST - 22 comments

Scrapnought (SYLT) building an acoustic guitar from scrap wood.
posted by plinth at 5:55 AM PST - 10 comments

Einstein’s monsters: what the Cold War films of the 1980s can teach us
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:31 AM PST - 33 comments

The New Yorker on facial feminization surgery. Challenging gender norms, beauty standards, the fraught notion of "passing," and affirming one's true self. (Note: contains somewhat graphic description of surgery about halfway through.)
posted by stillmoving at 1:43 AM PST - 52 comments

A Time of Plenty: Celebrating Nowruz in America Nowruz is the Iranian/Persian New Year, occurring at the time of the spring equinox (this year, it was today, March 20th). A short essay about want and abundance amongst exiles. [more inside]
posted by praemunire at 9:39 PM PST - 11 comments

Why would an American teenager ever leave the comforts of suburbia to fly to Syria and joın ISIS? [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:31 PM PST - 25 comments

I started telling stories onstage at The Moth’s story slam in New York City ten years ago this month. I’ve had some successes along the way but like all successes, they’re buttressed by constant, massive failures.[...] The following rules are things I’ve picked up along the way that help me shape and streamline a story for an audience that is hungry for human connection and a bunch of good laughs.

8 Rules for Fascinating Storytelling: a useful and accessible list of lessons learned from 10 years of onstage storytelling, from MeFi's own chinese_fashion. [via mefi projects]
posted by Anonymous at 7:57 PM PST - 47 comments

Ethan Persoff (creator of comic book scan collection Comics with Problems, the full archive of scans of underground newspaper The Realist and award-winning 2001 webcomic Teddy) is currently working on a synth music/comics project, THE BUREAU. Consisting of a series of comic panels, each accompanied by a music track, The Bureau depicts (in real-time) an ordinary humdrum day in the life of an office worker. Except the day turns out to not be quite so ordinary. Also, something is very wrong with the world, but that goes without saying. New update every weekday. [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 6:41 PM PST - 5 comments

Jia Tolentino writes for The New Yorker of The Overwhelming Emotion of Hearing Toto’s “Africa” Remixed to Sound Like It’s Playing in an Empty Mall, which is something you can experience on YouTube thanks to Cecil Robert, but he's not the first. Before him, and more prolific, there's allyson m. who also makes songs sound like you're listening from a bathroom (at a party*) or driving in a car in the rain. There's the false nostalgia for hearing songs in familiar, lonely settings. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 4:09 PM PST - 109 comments

One of France’s most influential contemporary thinkers, Marcel Gauchet manages to craft a compelling historical account of half a millennium, exploring how we arrived at today’s crisis—and how we might get out - Michael C. Berent reviews Marcel Gauchet's four-volume Advent of Democracy (L'Avènement de la démocratie) (2007-2017) series in Dissent Magazine. And here's a recent interview with Gauchet: "There has been an absolute victory of the democratic principle."
posted by sapagan at 1:45 PM PST - 5 comments

A great cover of Radiohead's "Paranoid Android", played on one cello
posted by cozenedindigo at 1:03 PM PST - 16 comments

The Student Yearbooks of a Japanese-American Detention Camp: Topaz operated like any other 1940s U.S. high school, except its teenagers were prisoners of the federal government (single link Atlas Obscura link) [more inside]
posted by crazy with stars at 12:56 PM PST - 10 comments

On what would have been his 90th birthday, Focus Features has dropped the first official trailer for a new documentary about Fred Rogers’ life and legacy: Won’t You Be My Neighbor? [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 11:44 AM PST - 85 comments

Food journalist Mark Bittman and Dr. David L. Katz, founder of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, sit down with Grub Street for a lengthy, exhaustive, no-"wellness"-nonsense interview about diet and nutrition.
posted by cichlid ceilidh at 11:10 AM PST - 84 comments

With more than 11 million followers on Facebook, David “Avocado” Wolfe, the Sideshow Bob-haired, blender-hawking alternative-health guru, calls himself the “Rock Star and Indiana Jones of the superfood universe.” And he's humble. You’ve undoubtedly seen one of his bullshit-filled posts or inspirational memes shared into your feed, but who — or more accurately, what — is David Avocado Wolfe? [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:49 AM PST - 85 comments

“It’s a surprisingly functional and actually really nice community,” says Walker Livingston...one of of more than a dozen mods on the Male Fashion Advice (MFA) subreddit Basically, there's a bunch of men on reddit looking for fashion advice, and they've created a remarkably open, inviting, and downright thoughtful community around it.
posted by foxywombat at 9:40 AM PST - 52 comments

“This is also why authoritarian “socialist” regimes don’t deserve the name. The whole purpose here is to increase people’s control over their circumstances. If you’re simply vesting that control in a government, and people have no say in that government, then there’s nothing socialistic about what is going on, unless the term is meaningless. Collective ownership means collective decision-making power. Without democratic decision-making, then there’s no collective ownership. There’s just government ownership, and governments themselves only conform to the principles of socialism to the extent they are democratic. In fact, “democratic socialism” should be a redundancy, because socialism should consist of the application of democracy to all aspects of life.” Socialism As A Set Of Principles (Current Affairs)
posted by The Whelk at 9:22 AM PST - 30 comments

A Rubik's cube being solved in 0.38 seconds. [more inside]
posted by zamboni at 9:20 AM PST - 15 comments

What your favorite website says about you?
posted by deezil at 8:31 AM PST - 53 comments

THE BIG TRANS AND INTERSEX FICTION AND POETRY TIMELINE! from Bogi Takács [more inside]
posted by palindromic at 8:30 AM PST - 3 comments

In keeping with their namesake, the early work of Cabaret Voltaire consisted primarily of Dada-influenced performance art and experimentation with tape machines, helping to pioneer industrial music in the mid-1970s. Finding an audience during the post-punk era, they integrated their experimentalist sensibilities with dance, new wave, and pop styles. Micro-Phonies, their 1984 album continued their journey from Dadaists to Dance Floor. [more inside]
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 7:26 AM PST - 12 comments

The surreal wordplay comedy of Ken Cheng will have you doing mental gymnastics with ordinary words: Ken Cheng: Chinese Comedian - 'Shame' [SLYT][NSWF] [more inside]
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 7:24 AM PST - 13 comments

Continuing to break protocol and tradition, the big news of the week (official press release, tweet) is that the Royal wedding (Rachel Meghan Markle, Henry Charles Albert David Mountbatten-Windsor) cake will not be fruitcake. It will be lemon elderflower, to symbolise Spring (appropriate), made with organic flour and designed by California-raised pastry chef Claire Ptak (Easter, Christmas), who runs Violet Cakes, and baked by her team. Claire specialises in "American style cakes". Quashing rumours it was to be banana cake, the cake will be covered in buttercream and adorned with flowers. Meghan, from Yorkshire via California, previously interviewed Claire for The Tig. Royal Fondling. Recipes from Cygnet Kitchen, Belvoir Fruit Farms, Hannah Bakes.
posted by Wordshore at 7:23 AM PST - 46 comments

A fifth package-bomb, destined for Austin, has exploded at a FedEx facility. Two people were injured in package-bomb explosions just yesterday. Austin police suspect that these incidents may be racially motivated and are now asking for the killer to reach out and talk to them. [more inside]
posted by runt at 7:22 AM PST - 144 comments

I would argue that the Trevor Jones parts of the 1984 Labyrinth Soundtrack Album are equally as strong as the David Bowie parts. Side A: Opening Titles Including Underground, Into The Labyrinth, Magic Dance, Sarah, Chilly Down, Hallucination [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 6:08 AM PST - 19 comments

By correlating crop yields and conflict in Africa over the years 1998-2008 using 55km x 55km grid, Ore Koren found that, contrary to previous expectations, conflict is driven by higher yields, on average, and not by scarcity. African Farming talks to Koren, who quotes one of history's deadliest warlords: "Armies march on their stomachs." "I think the key thing to take from this paper is that the root cause of violence over food is not necessarily low or high agricultural production, but rather limited access to food and the lack of social safety nets for those who are at the risk of being food insecure. Limited political and economic development means that many armed groups can or must rely on their own strength to enjoy agricultural resources."
posted by clawsoon at 5:40 AM PST - 3 comments

Sudan, the last male northern white rhino, has died. Two females of the subspecies remain.
posted by MrGuilt at 5:24 AM PST - 46 comments

Melvyn Bragg's South Bank Show profiles Rough Trade Records in 1979. Includes live footage of and interviews with Stiff Little Fingers, Lora Logic and Essential Logic, The Raincoats, Robert Rental and The Normal, and Geoff Travis and various Rough Traders.
posted by carter at 4:58 AM PST - 6 comments

Two uses for unused stadiums. The first is in Osaka. The second is in England: Highbury Square
posted by MovableBookLady at 9:20 PM PST - 27 comments

Poorly drawn comics of sock puppets. (Facebook warning.) For those of you who are currently Facebook averse, there is a subReddit and YouTube channel. If you like poorly drawn sock-puppet comics, that is.
posted by Slap*Happy at 7:02 PM PST - 3 comments

Dallas Texas in the 1980's had a transit program called Hop A Bus that was literally busses painted as bunnies. [more inside]
posted by Annika Cicada at 3:12 PM PST - 18 comments

Let's Talk About Guns and Video Games [Waypoint] “America is finally having an ongoing conversation about gun violence. In the wake of last month’s school shooting in Parkland, Florida, and driven by the energetic political action of countless students across the country, it feels like there could be real regulatory action taken for the first time since the Federal Assault Weapons Ban went out of effect in 2004. Unsurprisingly, those that would prefer to dodge such regulation have, in searching for an alibi for gun violence, pointed again towards video games. In the weeks that have followed, old debates have sparked new and classic scapegoats have been pushed again to cover for the nation's inability to address a root cause.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 3:01 PM PST - 81 comments

The historic cantilever bridge, originally called the Longview Bridge, is currently closed due to a bomb scare. The Coast Guard has closed the area to marine traffic as well. I'm kind of hoping that this year's squirrel bridge might be a tribute.
posted by OneSmartMonkey at 1:29 PM PST - 11 comments

A cartoon of a dad and a grandma wrestling with Amazon Alexa and then the reaction video from the family members involved.
posted by greenhornet at 12:17 PM PST - 36 comments

I Was a Male Makeup Virgin Until Rihanna Came Into My Life
posted by rewil at 11:02 AM PST - 43 comments

The Damned: how we made New Rose [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 9:28 AM PST - 30 comments

And Now, A Treasury Of Your Best Weird Grandpa Stories
posted by everybody had matching towels at 8:21 AM PST - 86 comments

Let’s say the situation at work is not good. The project (or product, or re-org, or whatever) has launched, and the best you can say is that things aren’t going as planned. At all. It’s a disaster, though the best word for it is the one you drop over drinks with your team and when venting at home: it’s a clusterfuck. […] To appreciate what a clusterfuck is—and to understand how to avoid one—it is first helpful to clarify some of the things a clusterfuck is not.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:49 AM PST - 62 comments

First named Spencer Tracy, the Dundee-based trio needed to rename after the estate of the actor threatened to sue. They chose Danny Wilson, after the eponymous Frank Sinatra character in "Meet Danny Wilson".
Signed to Virgin Records in 1986, their first album came out a year later, and spawned a world wide hit about a girl named Mary, but a careful listen to the entire album reveals a great deal more than just a girl praying. [more inside]
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 7:09 AM PST - 8 comments

Just five years years after his debut effort, Barry Manilow was able to release a double album of Greatest Hits, and if you're of a certain age, you know all these songs already. Side A: Mandy, New York City Rhythm, Ready To Take A Chance Again, Looks Like We Made It, Daybreak [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:49 AM PST - 37 comments

There's some hot fuss about the song Mr. Brightside by The Killers which, after an initially poor chart run, has now totalled 200 weeks in the UK Top 100. Here, it's averaged 878,000 streaming service plays a week this year, and is the most streamed track released prior to 2010; it also remains popular in the USA. Matrimonially banned from singing it, the song is firmly embedded in popular culture and can be spoken as sports commentary, as many covers abound and memes proliferate. As ubiquitous as Snow Patrol's Chasing Cars from 2006, next year there will be teenagers born *after* both these songs were released. The Google autocomplete lyrics and the actual lyrics; the original demo and back story. (Previously)
posted by Wordshore at 5:14 AM PST - 51 comments

Tony Lewis finds a new way of writing poetry, through artistry, and his assemblage of cut-up dialog balloons from Bill Watterson’s much-loved comic strip: This Artist Deconstructed His Love and Fascination for Calvin and Hobbes [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:07 AM PST - 3 comments

In January 2018, The New Yorker ran the article Lil Xan and the Year in Sad Rap, in which Carrie Battan provides a snapshot of a recent trend where "a cohort of young musicians embraced a depressive sound and became stars." Except the article misses the (slightly) longer history of this sub-genre, focusing on the recent past where Lil Uzi Vert's XO Tour Llif3 is a pinnacle of modern melancholy machismo, but missing 16 year old Yung Lean and his tongue-in-cheek cable broadcast "sadboy" aesthetic earlier in the current sad rap trend, back in 2013. And that's not the beginning, just another starting point. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:01 PM PST - 19 comments

The Original Little Mermaid: Amber Sparks writes on Kay Nielsen, Disney and the sanitization of the modern fairy tale. previously.
posted by Rumple at 9:41 PM PST - 32 comments

How we get from coveting midcentury things to the Internet of Things
posted by MovableBookLady at 8:50 PM PST - 26 comments

"And while it is true, as Yudkin (previously) divulges, that his sugar theory aroused opposition from those who believed saturated fat was the culprit in heart disease, the image of him as a shunned prophet, preaching in the wilderness and hounded by agents of industry, leaves out the extent to which his research was disbelieved mainly because the evidence supporting it did not hold up to scrutiny. High-profile attempts to replicate Yudkin’s signature finding that heart attack sufferers tended to be heavy sugar users flat-out failed. Present-day Yudkin disciples have also looked past the extent to which his research was richly supported by the food industry." [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 4:35 PM PST - 36 comments

Lauren Ruth Ward: the raspy, queer soul singer we deserve or what happens when you mix Florence Welch And Janis Joplin. [more inside]
posted by signal at 2:36 PM PST - 6 comments

It’s Time To Stop Acting Like Nobody Watches Anime [Kotaku] “Despite the genre’s overwhelming popularity, people act as if anime is still a niche interest. When celebrities like Kim Kardashian or Michael B. Jordan say that they’re fans, or Britney Spears posts pictures of her son’s Dragon Ball Z fanart on Instagram, fellow anime-enjoyers are shocked. Anime has actually been mainstream for a couple of decades now.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 2:32 PM PST - 56 comments

Five-year relative survival is lower for blacks than whites for most cancers at each stage of diagnosis. A 2017 documentary looks at cancer rates in a Georgia Pacific (Koch Brothers) company town, and posits that the economic consequences of racial discrimination increase cancer risk. [more inside]
posted by stillmoving at 2:07 PM PST - 3 comments

Self-referred as a hybrid form of Krautrock, neo-psychedelia and art punk, Suuns' 2013 release Images Du Futur, featured 20/20 and Edies's Dream. Their latest Felt, according to Pitchfork, "sees the four-piece loosen up and let slip the forces begging for release since their debut". The first three songs for a taste: Watch You, Watch Me, Look No Further and X-ALT.
posted by spaceburglar at 1:53 PM PST - 1 comment

Jillian Epperly’s recipe for a fermented cabbage slurry that makes “waterfalls” of diarrhea made her the head of what she called a “poop cult.” Thousands embraced her dangerous pseudoscience before a grassroots movement began working to shut her down when Facebook wouldn’t. A fascinating and horrifying account of how dangerous misinformation can entrench itself in the minds of some, who then adamantly resist all debunking or warnings from better-informed, concerned outsiders.
posted by orange swan at 1:15 PM PST - 102 comments

The Guardian reports on the purchase of Powder Mountain, Utah and its transformation into "a utopian club for the millennial elite." According to its founders, "all entrepreneurs in their 30s," Powder Mountain "is becoming a mecca for altruistically minded members of the global elite." The goal of the project is to "be a beacon of inspiration and a light in the world." [more inside]
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:12 AM PST - 65 comments

IDEA Instructions Common algorithms in the form of IKEA instructions.
posted by Artw at 10:09 AM PST - 22 comments

When my student asked, “Which one is Gen X?” I wanted to respond, “The one your classmates are dressed as. Floral dresses with baggy sweaters, beanies, and work boots? That was us.” I didn’t say that. Because we wore those clothes precisely to avoid becoming an easily legible demographic. Reflections on the 90’s fashion revival, from Racked.
posted by Grandysaur at 10:05 AM PST - 58 comments

In the latest Facebook data breach, Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm founded by Alexander Nix, which specializes in public influence campaigns, was commissioned by Stephen Bannon (who was in turn bankrolled by Robert Mercer) to collect and analyze data on Facebook users. CA adapted an online survey tool developed by academic Aleksandr Kogan. If a Facebook user opted in to the survey, for a small reward, the tool scraped not that user's profile, but the profiles of everybody that user was connected with. As former CA employee and whistleblower Christopher Wylie puts it, the process "scaled well." For relatively small outlay, CA were able to collect the profiles of 50-60+ million Facebook users for Bannon, to then be used for targeted political advertising. [more inside]
posted by carter at 10:01 AM PST - 115 comments

This Longest Shortest Time episode explores the history of twilight sleep in labor and delivery. Host Andrea Silenzi discusses why women advocated for twilight sleep and what happened to change their minds with author Randi Hutter Epstein. [Heads up: traumatic birth stuff.] [more inside]
posted by CMcG at 9:42 AM PST - 7 comments

Pioneer Spirits: New media representations of women in electronic music history
posted by OmieWise at 7:59 AM PST - 2 comments

Marielle Franco was a queer black human rights activist from Maré favela and a groundbreaking politician — she received more than 46.00 votes, the fifth-most, to become a councilwoman in Rio de Janeiro, the only black female representative and one of seven women on the 51-seat council. Last Wednesday night, after leaving an event called “Young Black Women Who Are Changing Power Structures” she and her driver, Anderson Pedro Gomes were shot and killed. [more inside]
posted by florzinha at 6:02 AM PST - 24 comments

Simon & Garfunkel's fourth album, Bookends [YT playlist ~30m], was a descendant of their involvement with the film The Graduate and was also their their response to The Beatles' Sgt. Peppers Album. Side A: Bookends Theme, Save The Life Of My Child, America, Overs, Voices Of Old People, Old Friends/Bookends Theme [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:07 AM PST - 24 comments

The English Wikipedia entry for human gets at least 5,000 views a day. Wired examines how its current main illustration, a photo of a couple from the Akha community in Thailand, came to replace the Pioneer plaque as a representation of all human beings. On-wiki discussions about the perfect illustration are extensive and ongoing.
posted by Vesihiisi at 1:32 AM PST - 24 comments

On day one of the 2018 Crufts dog show, Tinklebury “Tinks” Bingo the papillon took to the agility course with a distinctive set of moves.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:26 PM PST - 37 comments

The practice of hiding elements is common to all visual communications, not solely logos. It's as old as the practice of the design of logos itself.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:52 PM PST - 28 comments

A video on the illusions of Kokichi Sugihara. [SLYT] Previously in Gravity is Optional.
posted by jjray at 8:09 PM PST - 6 comments

Marvel at Tiny, Perfect Staircases Made by a Secret Society of French Woodworkers The name “compagnon” translates to “companion,” relating to the brotherhood between members and the shared identity of a movement that, today, encompasses around 12,000 permanent, active members. Professions usually fall into one of five “groups,” depending on their principal material: stone; wood; metal; leather and textiles; and food. Within these groups are bakers, clog-makers, carpenters, masons, glaziers, and many more. In the past century, new trades have been added and old ones have fallen away. [more inside]
posted by MovableBookLady at 7:24 PM PST - 21 comments

In the US and Canada, St. Patrick's is often remembered as a day of drinking and celebrating the achievements of the Irish diaspora in their new homelands. In Mexico, however, the holiday remembers another aspect of the Irish-American diaspora: the two hundred men of the St. Patrick's battalion, who deserted the U.S. Army during the Spanish-American War to fight on behalf of the invaded state of Mexico. Anti-Catholic sentiment within the US Army may have played a role, as did Irish identification with the plight of the Mexican people. While Mexico ultimately lost that war and had to cede large swathes of territory to the increasingly expansionist United States, the men of the St. Patrick's Battalion are remembered fondly for their great effort and sacrifice. [more inside]
posted by sciatrix at 2:18 PM PST - 9 comments

Surgical Resident Breaks Down 49 Medical Scenes From Film & TV (SLYT, 20:55)
posted by AFABulous at 1:50 PM PST - 67 comments

The other opioid crisis: Hospital shortages lead to patient pain, medical errors. The flip side of the opioid crisis is just as dark. "Even as opioids flood American communities and fuel widespread addiction, hospitals are facing a dangerous shortage of the powerful painkillers needed by patients in acute pain, according to doctors, pharmacists and a coalition of health groups." [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 1:42 PM PST - 55 comments

Martina Vinci organised a flash mob rendition of the Fiona Apple song Hot Knife in the Genoa Metro in Italy. After it was posted to the interwebs... Fiona Apple heard it. [more inside]
posted by Lanark at 12:52 PM PST - 17 comments

Matt Adrian, AKA The Mincing Mockingbird, paints birds. [more inside]
posted by hilaryjade at 12:37 PM PST - 8 comments

NO, THE IRISH WERE NOT SLAVES TOO: Historian Liam Hogan has spent the last six years debunking the Irish were slave myth. (Previously)
posted by The Whelk at 11:08 AM PST - 45 comments

So was it Alex Garland who actually directed Dredd? Karl Urban says so (and he also wants to keep playing the character). [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 10:59 AM PST - 45 comments

Bowser Is Only Four Feet Tall, Judging By Luigi’s Penis [Kotaku] “Thanks to this promotional image for the upcoming Mario Tennis Aces, an intrepid fan figured out how big Luigi’s dick is. Let’s use their math to figure out the sizes of other Mario objects and characters. Let’s not beat around the bush here. In this promotional picture for Mario Tennis Aces, you can see the outline of something in his pants that is more than just Ken-doll smoothness. Assuming it’s not a 1-up mushroom that he stashed away for later, that is presumably Luigi’s penis.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:28 AM PST - 45 comments

Since the NCAA men's basketball tournament adopted its current format of four 16-team brackets in 1985, a 16th seed had never, in 135 tries, won its opening-round game against a 1st-seeded team. Until last night, when the University of Maryland, Baltimore County Retrievers blew out the University of Virginia Cavaliers, 74-54. [more inside]
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 7:13 AM PST - 41 comments

It wasn't just Greece: Archaeologists find early democratic societies in the Americas is one of a pair of articles by Lizzie Wade about recent archeological studies of ancient Mesoamerican societies which have uncovered evidence that some were not autocratic but collective and democratic. It takes Tlaxcallan and Teotihuacan as its central examples, but looks further afield, even to societies outside the Americas. The second article, Kings of Cooperation, focuses on one example, the Olmec city of Tres Zapotes, which had seven centuries of collective rule in between times of kingship.
posted by Kattullus at 1:58 AM PST - 19 comments

The fifth album from Eurythmics, Be Yourself Tonight [YT album ~43m30s], , moved away from electronica and was a major hit around the world. Side A: Would I Lie To You? [video], There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart) [video], I Love You Like A Ball And Chain, Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves [video] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 10:18 PM PST - 21 comments

Nathan J. Robinson's authoritative and unrelenting tear-down of the Jordan Peterson sham. [more inside]
posted by little eiffel at 8:40 PM PST - 168 comments

These uniquely versatile bugs are decimating crops and infiltrating houses all across the country . Will we ever be able to get rid of them? SLNY (previously).
posted by blue shadows at 7:24 PM PST - 26 comments

Rick & Morty x Run The Jewels: Oh Mama (slyt)
posted by zarq at 6:30 PM PST - 5 comments

A 1:10 timelapse of the Aurora Borealis over Fairbanks, AK by photographer William Briscoe (Facebook page), filmed as a 360°, 8k timelapse. Oh, plus a lunar eclipse. [more inside]
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 4:58 PM PST - 6 comments

One set of Navajo boxers , one set of Syrian refugee slackliners.The Navajo youngsters live near Chinle, a long way from anywhere or anything. The last of a line of boxers teaches them, any age, any gender, for free without support. It's hard to make a career happen in these circumstances. [more inside]
posted by MovableBookLady at 4:23 PM PST - 6 comments

GRACE: Come for the baby gorilla tickling, stay for the rehabilitation.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:01 PM PST - 8 comments

Just a collection of interesting houses I've seen lately: Michigan farmhouse among world's greenest - Hong Kong tiny apartment for 3 showcases art pottery - Oakland cabin covered in 3D-printed tiles - Detroit home with a unique design aesthetic, sold with all contents - A teeny English castle - Indianapolis home a modern spin on a Victorian to fit an older neighborhood - Mexico: Giant boulder for a roof, this is fine - Florida home of three pavilions connected by a lap pool - Hong Kong transforming apartment - Small Shanghai apartment given a cat-friendly makeover
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 3:04 PM PST - 47 comments

'One two-metre paperbark held over 500 frogs, 10 skinks, four blue-tongue lizards, three goannas and two snakes.' Broome (WA) smashes annual rainfall record in less than two months as Cyclone Kelvin caps big wet.
posted by asok at 3:01 PM PST - 4 comments

Constantin Reliu asked a Romanian court to overturn his death certificate. The court told him he was too late and would have to remain officially deceased. (SL Guardian)
posted by stillmoving at 2:02 PM PST - 45 comments

VOX: Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY), who at 88 years old was the oldest member of the House of Representatives, has died. Slaughter, who was the top Democrat on the powerful Rules Committee, which determines how bills are voted on the House floor — and the only woman to ever chair that committee — fell at her residence in Washington, DC, and suffered a concussion last week. She was taken to George Washington University Hospital for treatment, where she died, her office confirmed Friday morning. [more inside]
posted by pjsky at 1:45 PM PST - 37 comments

Andrea Tomingas (MetaFilter's Uncle Glendinning) prepared this how-to-negotiate-salary doc (on Google Docs) for some family and friends and is now sharing it with the world! "I'm a woman in tech and I had to kinda figure out how to negotiate salary on my own (but see note inside) so wanted to share my experience to level the playing field a bit." [via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 1:25 PM PST - 25 comments

All rise and no fall: how "Civilization" reinforces a dangerous myth. Whether your aim is world conquest or cultural hegemony, victory in Civilization and many of its cohorts depends on domination. However peacefully you try to play, you’re often straight-jacketed into a utilitarian-psychotic view where all resources and people are just raw material to be assimilated, Borg-like, until the whole map is monochrome. [more inside]
posted by joechip at 12:45 PM PST - 33 comments

DIY At-Home Synthetic Diamonds [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:22 PM PST - 16 comments

Happy anniversary Joni...
posted by jim in austin at 11:46 AM PST - 12 comments

On September 3rd, 2017, Adam Ondra became the first person to climb Silence, currently considered to be the most difficult rock climbing route in the world with a proposed rating of 5.15d / 9c. A 17 minute film by Bernardo Giménez documents Ondra's process and the successful climb (you can skip to the actual ascent at 10:56). Shortly thereafter, on October 22nd, Angela Eiter became the first woman to climb a route rated 5.15b / 9b and one of only three people in the world (including Ondra) to have completed that particular route, La planta de Shiva.
posted by jedicus at 11:07 AM PST - 30 comments

“The purpose of a truly left policy is to imagine that something can be done, that ills we view as incurable can in fact be cured, and that evils we view as perennial can be eradicated.” Fellow Travellers is a new project of several foreign policy and international relations-oriented writers and academics to promote left foreign policy discussion. Opening essays: “A Case For Transational Justice” on the purpose of properly dealing with the crimes of past administrations - “Reckoning With The Imperial We” what’s to be done with the not quite states of America? - “The Skripal Poisonings and the Chance To Build A Left Foreign Policy” how to deal with global olgliachs one seized asset at a time.
posted by The Whelk at 10:47 AM PST - 8 comments

Following the recent and still unfolding incident in a cathedral city - Theresa is down with the residents while Jezza suggests caution - relations between the UK and Russia are ... not good. Sanctions have been declared, the Royal Family will be watching England get knocked out of the World Cup on TV now, and retaliation is actioned. International support is requested, the agent source is being conjectured, the UK defence minister tells Russia to "Go away" - but is largely ignored - and their embassy continues to tweet sarcastically. As yet another recent death is probably not helping, Arsenal's draw (wtf?!, more) in European football today was unfortunate. Brits currently in Russia are sighing, while those thinking of visiting have updated travel advice issued for them. (title)
posted by Wordshore at 9:59 AM PST - 59 comments

All of the songs played on WKRP in Cincinnati, in a spreadsheet. From WKRP Superfan Mike Hernandez.
posted by Cookiebastard at 9:31 AM PST - 24 comments

Jenny Nicholson presents: Ready Player One for Girls [more inside]
posted by cendawanita at 8:25 AM PST - 203 comments

Magic Item generator
posted by Sebmojo at 5:43 AM PST - 47 comments

Meet Pantosaurus - [the] pant-wearing Dino! He wants every child to stay safe and strong, just like him, and he's on a mission to share an important message. (For Americans, this time we mean the pants under your pants. Although I think it still works with the over-pants too.) [more inside]
posted by fizban at 3:25 AM PST - 26 comments

Starring Randy Newman as Devil, James Taylor as Lord, Don Henley as Faust, Elton John as Angel Rick, Linda Ronstadt as Margaret, and Bonnie Raitt as Martha: Randy Newman's Faust, a 1995 album written by the master of comedic cynicism: Cassette Side A [Lyrics sometimes NSFW]: Glory Train; Can't Keep A Good Man Down; How Great Our Lord; Best Little Girl; Northern Boy; Bless The Children Of The World; Gainesville; Relax, Enjoy Yourself [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 10:03 PM PST - 14 comments

Surviving Mars: Fourth Rock from the Sun [Destructoid] “You'd be forgiven for assuming that a game called “Surviving Mars” might be yet another entry in the burgeoning survival genre, a Minecraft-esque recreation of Andy Weir's The Martian, or Bohemia’s Take On Mars. You'd be wrong, but a title like that invariably conjures images of punching Mars rocks to build Mars huts and craft Mars shovels and that sort of thing. Well, you do all of the above in Surviving Mars, except from a top-down perspective, as the game is actually a city-building and management sim from the folks that brought you the last three Tropico titles. But rather than playing a developing-world dictator, players this time step into the environment-sealed boots of a Martian colonial administrator, tasked with establishing humanity's first extraplanetary settlement. For that to happen, of course, survival is a must.” [Youtube][Trailer] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 7:49 PM PST - 44 comments

The question, then, is how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obligated to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question, a question usually answered by more general patterns of domination and exclusion.

Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex? A piece by philosopher Amia Srinivasan in the London Review of Books. [more inside]
posted by painquale at 6:30 PM PST - 95 comments

Creating undiscovered landscapes by clever use of drone-assisted lighting in this series of photographs by Reuben Wu (previously).
posted by Stark at 2:46 PM PST - 3 comments

The Trump Show, Episode 22: amid deadly showdowns with Russia, North Korea, Iran, and the UAE, the President gets tough with Canada. And there's oh, so much more inside. [more inside]
posted by msalt at 12:50 PM PST - 2257 comments

It’s shuffleboard meets Swiffer ad. [But:] “It’s way harder than you think,” Mark Shegelski, a physicist at the University of Northern British Columbia, and a recreational curler, told me recently. “It’s like golf: it’s easy to watch a guy hit a golf ball, and you think, ‘This isn’t very athletic.’ And then you get out there yourself and find that it’s incredibly difficult.” Also incredibly difficult: understanding why curling stones curl the way they do, a problem that Shegelski has been chipping away at for two decades. ... What curling rocks do is so complicated that there’s got to be more than one thing going on. [SL NewYorker]
posted by RedOrGreen at 12:31 PM PST - 11 comments

Muppet Guys Talking is a documentary from Muppeteer and film director Frank Oz, featuring interviews with a number of present and past Muppet performers: Dave Goelz (Gonzo, Bunsen Honeydew), Jerry Nelson (Floyd, Emmet Otter, The Count), Fran Brill (Prairie Dawn, Zoe), Bill Barretta (Pepe, Big Mean Carl) and Oz himself. The film will be available to the public tomorrow, but you can get a sneak peek of it today.
posted by briank at 10:48 AM PST - 21 comments

Genderfluid elves : In their weekly tease of upcoming content, lead designer Jeremy Crawford talked about planned changes to elves. In this update to the game's cosmology, the creator of the elves, Corellon Larethian was an androgynous being who can change form at will, as could the ancestral elves. Naturally, 'Some elves retain a blessing of Corellon. As part of this blessing, these elves can actually choose their biological sex whenever they finish a long rest. These elves can choose to be male, female, or "neither" based on their moods or feelings.' [more inside]
posted by bonehead at 10:20 AM PST - 94 comments

The Master of Body Horror: A David Cronenberg Horror Retrospective. To celebrate his birthday, explore TIFF's virtual David Cronenberg exhibition (previously on Metafilter), or ruminate over whether 1983's Videodrome has aged well. [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 10:14 AM PST - 42 comments

A contact sheet of 70 rare photos, found at a garage sale, led a man on an odyssey. The photographer was unknown. There was a Zodiac Killer connection. The quality of the photos was high. How to get started finding the source?
posted by MovableBookLady at 10:07 AM PST - 11 comments

“I don’t think Americans have trouble simultaneously believing that stories of the CIA assassinating people are mostly “crazy,” and that they absolutely happened. What emerges from the contradiction is naïveté coated in a candy shell of cynicism, in the form of a trivia game called “Did you know the CIA _____?” Did you know the CIA killed Mossadegh? Did you know they killed Lumumba? Did you know the CIA killed Marilyn Monroe and Salvador Allende? Did you know they made a fake porn movie with a Sukarno lookalike, and they had to take out Noriega because he still had his CIA paystubs in a box in his closet? There’s a whole variant just about Fidel Castro. Some of these stories are urban legends, most are fundamentally true, and yet as individual tidbits they lack a total context. If cold war is the name for the third world war that didn’t happen, what’s the name for what did?” Did you know the CIA _____? (N+1)
posted by The Whelk at 9:56 AM PST - 17 comments

How to Launch a Physical Product. "... lately, all that people are talking about is digital products. And I get it. I really do. The margins are great. They’re easy to make. They’re even easier to sell. But what if the thing that you want to make is a physical thing? What if, like me, you’re obsessed with creating something you can hold in your hands?"
posted by storybored at 9:55 AM PST - 16 comments

Daniel Mallory Ortberg's new story "The Fisherman and His Friend" from his book "The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror" is now available on Buzzfeed.
posted by Krazor at 9:27 AM PST - 23 comments

The latest world happiness report (170 page PDF, supporting website) by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. BBC: “This year's happiest place on Earth is Finland, according to an annual UN report - toppling Norway from the top spot.” Guardian: “For the first time the UN also examined the happiness levels of immigrants in each country, and found Finland also scored highest.” Washington Post: “Perhaps tired of winning, the United States falls in World Happiness rankings.” Telegraph: “Happiness was defined by six factors: income, healthy life expectancy, social support, freedom, trust and generosity.” Huffington Post: “The Nordic ‘secret’ to happiness lies in their ability to limit misery – that is, people who report very low levels of happiness.”
posted by Wordshore at 9:17 AM PST - 23 comments

Jason Williams, who goes under the moniker REVOK, threatened H&M with litigation after the retailer featured an image of graffiti which he claimed to have created in its online advertising. Williams allegedly demanded compensation from H&M. [more inside]
posted by devious truculent and unreliable at 8:29 AM PST - 52 comments

In January, the Asbury Park Press (APP) published "The Shield" -- a 19-part investigation of police corruption and lack of accountability in New Jersey. The exposé took two years to complete and revealed that municipalities across the state had collectively spent about $43 million in taxpayer money to cover up the brutal actions of rogue cops who had killed, beaten and stalked more than 200 citizens. In many cases, the cops were not only protected from punishment, but even kept their jobs and received promotions. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 8:25 AM PST - 17 comments

NASA’s Twins Study confirms 7% of astronaut and identical twin Scott Kelly’s DNA remains altered, two years after returning from one year aboard the International Space Station. [more inside]
posted by slipthought at 6:20 AM PST - 72 comments

Glaucous, the Greeny Blue of Epic Poetry and Succulents , Katy Kellehe - "English has a lot of terms for blue-y greens and greenish blues, and some of them feel like arbitrary bullshit." [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:34 PM PST - 34 comments

Titan might seem an unlikely place to for humans to build settlements, and maybe eventually colonize. After all, it is so far from the sun, and extraordinarily cold, and it's a long journey to get there (at present). But actually, if you set aside the difficulty of getting there, which we should overcome as our technology improves—it's got more going for it than you might think.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:55 PM PST - 17 comments

Blowzabella (Wikipedia; official website) was formed in east London in 1978 by two students of musical instrument making at the London College of Furniture, Bill O'Toole and Jon Swayne. They named their band after an English jig (and bawdy drinking song), "Blowzabella My Bouncing Doxie." The band has grown and changed over the decades, but has always included bagpipes, a hurdy-gurdy and an array of acoustic instruments, used to make driving, drone-based sound influenced by British and European traditional dance music. You can hear that sound on Soundcloud, or see a ton of their material on YouTube, from a live performance in three parts from 2013 (live at Cecil Sharp House, where they'll return) to a video of one of their new songs featuring vocals, "Adam Was A Poacher." [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:50 PM PST - 4 comments

The Housemartins 1986 debut album London 0 Hull 4 [YT album, ~37m] mixed old rock styles and gospel and a lot of other stuff (jangle pop, anyone?) to chart strongly in the UK and in Europe. [Ed. note: it's a genuinely rewarding listen.] It also had quite a few hits: Side A: Happy Hour [video, weird artifacting but it is the full video], Get Up Off Our Knees, Flag Day (fan video), Anxious, Reverends Revenge, Sitting On A Fence [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:22 PM PST - 38 comments

"A totally true account of a time I went off-line." Vann R. Newkirk II decides to outdo Farhad Manjoo. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 7:17 PM PST - 27 comments

In addition to Star Trek: The Animated Series, He-Man, She-Ra and some other fondly-remembered shows, Filmation also produced, well, a lot of ridiculous crap. Here is some: an hour of "Fraidy Cat," nearly two hours of "Quackula" (unrelated to Cosgrove-Hall's much better Count Duckula), and an unsold pilot for "Dick Digit," an action/comedy show, that has to be seen to be believed. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 6:53 PM PST - 32 comments

Who maps the world? Why women cartographers are important.
posted by AFABulous at 4:54 PM PST - 28 comments

Elizabeth Catte discusses her book in an interview with Guernica magazine. [more inside]
posted by eviemath at 4:37 PM PST - 19 comments

Freedom of Information requests are a fantastic tool for citizens and journalists alike, but they're also a favourite with people who have an axe to grind. When 'James' demanded to know why he had to pay for Adult Social Services and the Fire Brigade though, he probably didn't expect so blunt an answer from South Somerset District Council.
posted by garius at 3:52 PM PST - 32 comments

Buy High, Sell Cheap: An Interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky (Elianna Kan, The Paris Review).
posted by sapagan at 1:56 PM PST - 13 comments

In the aftermath of rape, Alison Kinney discovers that a new lover who helps you to heal can just as easily betray you.
posted by josher71 at 1:16 PM PST - 18 comments

From the team that brought you March Fadness (previously) and March Sadness (previously) comes 𝔐𝔞𝔯𝔠𝔥 𝔖𝔥𝔯𝔢𝔡𝔫𝔢𝔰𝔰 - a literary tournament of hair metal songs.
posted by AndrewStephens at 1:01 PM PST - 15 comments

The Urban Freight Lab studies traffic at, as it were, the capillary level. Package delivery, trash pickup, loading zones, parking or not.
posted by clew at 12:51 PM PST - 1 comment

"Frozen" drag queen helps police van break out of snowbank "A drag queen dressed as Elsa just single-handedly freed a stuck police wagon from a blizzard in the middle of March. If that sentence doesn't perfectly encapsulate the spirit of Boston, I don't know what does." (Video credit: Christopher Haynes). SLTwitter
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 12:38 PM PST - 24 comments

Alex Gorosh and Wylie Overstreet showed some people the moon.
posted by uncleozzy at 12:21 PM PST - 42 comments

Anecdotes about any particular diet’s efficacy are often trumpeted by highly motivated individuals in which the diet may align with their personal ideologies. But when thinking about health and nutrition in a scientific way, how should we internalize them?

Colby Vorland from the American Society for Nutrition discusses how we should view diet anecdotes.
posted by daybeforetheday at 12:07 PM PST - 2 comments

The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down — in which Aaron Gordon, writer of Signal Problems, the best newsletter on the subway, and Village Voice MTA reporter finds a report from 2014 and the best facebook group ever, and gets to the heart of what really be slowing down the trains in New York.
posted by dame at 9:25 AM PST - 67 comments

So yeah. Nectome is a preserve-your-brain-and-upload-it company. Its chemical solution can keep a body intact for hundreds of years, maybe thousands, as a statue of frozen glass. The idea is that someday in the future scientists will scan your bricked brain and turn it into a computer simulation. That way, someone a lot like you, though not exactly you, will smell the flowers again in a data server somewhere.

A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal.” Nectome will preserve your brain, but you have to be euthanized first. [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 9:14 AM PST - 142 comments

Rock Hudson walked out of the premiere, Hal was originally a cockney, and Stanley Kubrick used one of the model spaceships to pay his daughter’s tutor … the makers of the sci-fi classic share their memories. By Phil Hoad for The Guardian.
posted by valkane at 8:50 AM PST - 31 comments

Introducing... Jetpack Cat. [YouTube] “Jetpack Cat isn’t an official Overwatch hero (yet), but this faux-hero-introduction video from To Binge does a great job of illustrating why the scrapped idea turned incessant in-joke would be perfect for the job. Here is concept art of legendary scrapped Overwatch hero, Jetpack Cat. During a BlizzCon panel about Overwatch’s formative days, game director Jeff Kaplan and art director Arnold Tsang talked more about his origins, saying that they were trying to figure out how far was too far with regards to character designs. “We tried a robot monkey. We tried a crocodile!” said Tsang. That led to Jetpack Cat, who—despite being one of the most popular early hero designs at Blizzard—was scrapped because, Kaplan explained, it was “not Overwatch at this point.” A gorilla scientist from the moon, however, was fine.” [via: Kotaku]
posted by Fizz at 6:37 AM PST - 17 comments

Is the Crème Egg Yorkshire Pudding really a cake? A recent surge in cake news has provided (Prince and more Prince) a delicious antidote (Little Debbies) to politics (though, as with Nailed It, politics still often lurks). Cheshire cat cake roll and dog cakes. The Royal wedding cake may be banana and not fruitcake (and other breaks with tradition). Pear, rye and cardamom cake, and "when he went to buy a cake". Ben and Jerry's release a new flavor, which may appeal to French rugby players. Debbie Wingham busily makes an expensive cake and a Kim Kardashian cake. The most instagrammed cake in the world? Kaffee und kuechen helps big business in Germany. Newark castle. Bake this courgette cake. Also, Nick Hewer's buns and Irish apple cake and cake from 17 years ago this Saturday.
posted by Wordshore at 5:42 AM PST - 42 comments

Today, Americans consume about 1.5 billion pounds of potato chips every year. But the origin story they've been fed is probably a myth, historians reveal. [more inside]
posted by Vesihiisi at 1:02 AM PST - 58 comments

Always Human, by Ari Walkingnorth: In a future Australia, where body modification mods are ubiquitous, Sunati is fascinated by a woman she sees at the train station, who apparently has no mods at all. An offer of an anti-allergy mod simply upsets the woman, and causes her to leave. In a second meeting, the woman, Austen, explains over a cup of coffee; she has an overactive immune system, meaning she can't use mods at all. Day to day things that are simple for everyone else, like enhanced memory or changing her features, are frustratingly difficult or impossible for her. On impulse, Sunati asks her out, and despite her reservations about Sunati’s motives, Austen agrees... [more inside]
posted by happyroach at 12:30 AM PST - 22 comments

"Duelling codes, though intended to curb violence, may only have ritualized it."
posted by spaceburglar at 9:36 PM PST - 20 comments

Stephen Hawking, one of the great minds of our age, has passed on to the stars today at the age of 76. [more inside]
posted by RolandOfEld at 9:32 PM PST - 219 comments

"Motörhead" via Hawkwind "Motörhead" via Motörhead "Motörhead" via Corduroy
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 9:10 PM PST - 7 comments

Robert Mitchum's car-chase classic put the mountain South on the Hollywood map. On the basis of these posters with a deranged-looking Mitchum, anyone unfamiliar with the film could be forgiven for expecting a hot-rods-to-Hell opus with Mitchum playing another of his unhinged anti-heroes — a Cape Fear on wheels. Those who have actually seen Thunder Road, however, will see in these blaring broadsheets something quite at odds with this dreamy little movie, which shares many of the qualities of its star-producer-writer-uncredited director Mitchum: it’s brusque, languid, a little bedraggled, and ultimately oddly haunting [quoted from the article]. [more inside]
posted by MovableBookLady at 8:51 PM PST - 5 comments

The Quietus' Top 40 Genre Compilation Albums From The Anthology of American Folk Music to Sushi 3003: A Spectacular Collection Of Japanese Clubpop, a collection of recommendations from the Quietus writers.
posted by OmieWise at 6:36 PM PST - 13 comments

Michael Cretu didn't quite know what he was getting into when he turned into Curly M.C. and in 1990 released Enigma - MCMXC a.D [YT album, ~40m] Cassette Side A: The Voice Of Enigma, Principles Of Lust (Sadeness, Find Love, Sadeness Reprise) [The Voice Of Enigma video, Principles Of Lust video], Callas Went Away [video] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:39 PM PST - 30 comments

Here's everything you need to know: With the #avocard, you’ll get all the perks of the 26-30 railcard. Simply present an avocado in place of the railcard at any Virgin Trains West Coast station to get a 1/3 off our fares . Genuine offer. Actual avocado needed. [more inside]
posted by ambrosen at 3:20 PM PST - 33 comments

Phil Plait, astronomer and writer of the Bad Astronomy blog, has a Crash Course on Astronomy on YouTube. [more inside]
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:51 PM PST - 9 comments

Project Veritas' unusual-and-often-illegal style of guerrilla journalism looks for conservative-bias at Twitter. Using fake job posting/interviews, cat-fishing on dating sites and other methods, they attempt to get employees to say incriminating (or editable to sound incriminating) things. James O'Keefe previously and Project Veritas
posted by k5.user at 11:55 AM PST - 40 comments

The Bald Future
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 10:35 AM PST - 104 comments

Drug makers have raised prices on treatments for life-threatening or chronic conditions like multiple sclerosis, diabetes and cancer. In turn, insurers have shifted more of those costs onto consumers. Saddled with high deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs that expose them to a drug’s rising list price, many people are paying thousands of dollars a month merely to survive. These are the stories of Americans living daily with the reality of high-cost drugs. And there are millions of others just like them. The Price They Pay (ProPublica, NYT)
posted by The Whelk at 9:54 AM PST - 43 comments

Twitter user @ThaumPenguin has assembled a thread of remarkable Tumblr posts. For example: Brerd; Flower power; Be the one you needed. (ThreadReader version for the Twitter-averse; h/t Phire)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:19 AM PST - 23 comments

Like A Ship (title track link) by Pastor TL Barrett and the Youth for Christ Choir may be one of the great lost gospel records - and one made by a duplicitous conman. Can we still enjoy something beautiful when made by someone later despicable?
posted by mippy at 4:42 AM PST - 22 comments

Want to view an alien planet in detail? Simple: create a telescope, send it somewhere between 51 and 185 billion miles away from Earth, turn it around, and use the Sun as a gravity lens to image another world. Focussed through our local star's Einstein Ring, the telescope would bring in enough visual information to resolve features the size of Central Park on an alien surface. [more inside]
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 4:19 AM PST - 39 comments

Reddit and the struggle to detoxify the internet. How do we fix life online without limiting free speech? By Andrew Marantz for The New Yorker.
posted by valkane at 4:01 AM PST - 101 comments

Overshadowed by barbecue in its home state, Tex-Mex is the most important, least understood regional cuisine in America

The standard narrative about Tex-Mex is that it’s an inauthentic, unartful, cheese-covered fusion, the kind of eating meant to be paired with unhealthy amounts of alcohol or to cure the effects thereof. There’s a lot of easy-melt cheese, the margaritas are made with a mix, and the salsas come from a bottle. In our snackwave food moment, Tex-Mex receives the same amount of affection and respect as a Doritos Locos taco or a microwaved burrito — a processed, comforting, lovable American monster.

Those assumptions are entirely wrong.

posted by frimble at 1:13 AM PST - 92 comments

If you've been keeping up with Polygon videos, you may have noticed Brian David Gilbert's appearance in a multitude of new series such as Week in Revue and Gill and Gilbert. BDG has a knack for melding music and comedy, and has created many skits on his Youtube channel (previously). [more inside]
posted by Lurch at 8:44 PM PST - 6 comments

The Vatican, the exorcists and the return of the Devil in a time of enchantment: "This re-emergence of the Devil in popular Western culture is part of a new engagement with an enchanted world. Popular culture has embraced a realm of preternatural beings both good and evil – vampires and fairies, witches and wizards, werewolves and wraiths, shape-shifters and superheroes, succubi and incubi, elves and aliens, hobbits and the denizens of Hogwarts, not to mention zombies."
posted by spaceburglar at 4:43 PM PST - 39 comments

Over 20,000 posters, all originals, no reprints. Also books, magazines, exhibitions, and other stuff.
posted by MovableBookLady at 4:40 PM PST - 6 comments

"When I'm not lucid, there is such a tie to feeling as though I've always been the same, as though I've always been sad or scared. And it feels shameful. It feels as though people prefer lucid, high functioning, somewhat normal brain chemistry me, and that the other version is a burden, an inconvenience to be around." A web-comic celebration of both.
posted by miniraptor at 4:18 PM PST - 3 comments

More or less. Travel Oregon has produced a lovely, Studio Ghibli-esque piece about what it's like to visit Oregon. [more inside]
posted by Secretariat at 3:45 PM PST - 43 comments

The Shocking Assassination of President Guy Fieri by Hudson Hongo [Motherboard] “Good luck finding someone who's actually optimistic about the future of online entertainment, given that major platforms like YouTube and Facebook are currently locked in a death race to the bottom to win meager slices of our attention. Certainly not Hudson Hongo, who, as news editor of Gizmodo, knows as much about this algorithmically mediated, brain-flattening future as anyone, and who brings us a dispatch from the only logical conclusion to the content wars.”
posted by Fizz at 3:20 PM PST - 13 comments

The Wadsworth Atheneum has acknowledged that a secretary-bookcase purportedly built as a memorial to a real soldier who died at Antietam is actually a fake. The forger, Harold Gordon, constructed not only the secretary, but also a backstory and supporting documentation. [more inside]
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 2:45 PM PST - 16 comments

Hello. Do you eat correctly? Do you spread or dollop your cream? Do you use science? Do you have no shame? In Cornwall, the jam is applied first. But in Devon, the cream has been applied first for the last 1,021 years. While all this may confuse German tourists and future Royals (say it like this), issues are further muddied by opinion pieces and afternoon/cream tea differences. However, to widespread disgust, a person in Cornwall recently used the Devonian approach, continuing the conflict (more). Unfortunately, in apologising (Facebook) to dissuade a boycott or membership cancellations, a photograph of a scone containing sultanas exacerbated tensions. (compromise) There is - currently - no hard border between Devon and Cornwall, despite the recent conflict. God Save The Queen.
posted by Wordshore at 1:52 PM PST - 69 comments

Super Mario Bros 2 with its music frequency table "reversed.". I'm not sure what that means exactly but it's certainly an, um, unique sound. The same thing done to Mario 3. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 1:34 PM PST - 55 comments

The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry is a BBC Radio 4 show and podcast that features Dr. Adam Rutherford for Biology and Dr. Hannah Fry for Mathematics answering everyday science mysteries sent in by listeners. [more inside]
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:26 PM PST - 3 comments

The SimuLife Diaries • The Verge's Bryan Bishop finds himself in a four-day "immersive story experience" which includes a reunion with an old UT professor he's never before met, alternate timelines, and discovering he's married to a US Senator. Mind the warble. [more inside]
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 1:22 PM PST - 11 comments

CEO Gets Busted for Selling BlackBerry Phones to a Drug Cartel FBI arrested Vincent Ramos, the founder and CEO of Canada-based Phantom, with charges of racketeering conspiracy to conduct enterprise affairs, as well as conspiracy to distribute narcotics, and aiding and abetting.
posted by Yellow at 12:51 PM PST - 9 comments

Meet Yugen Blakrok, The South African Rapper Featured on the “Black Panther” Soundtrack. Listen to her album "Return of the Astro Goth" here, and follow her on soundcloud here
posted by rebent at 12:28 PM PST - 11 comments

Russian Masha Ivashintsova photographed constantly but never showed her work to anyone. In late 2017, a relative stumbled on boxes of negatives and undeveloped film gathering dust in an attic. Here are some of the 30,000 images from the remarkable discovery. [more inside]
posted by komara at 11:57 AM PST - 13 comments

I found an undeveloped film in an old Soviet camera, got the images developed and found 19 black & white photos of a boy and his first day at school. I decided to find him almost 30 years later.
posted by josher71 at 11:42 AM PST - 12 comments

Journey into Antarctica's wild interior with photojournalist Christopher Michel (via Smithsonian and Earther).
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 11:10 AM PST - 5 comments

The Netherlands is known today as a haven for pedestrians and cyclists - but this wasn't always so. In the 1970s, a growing epidemic of traffic deaths led to a nationwide advocacy movement called Stop the Child Murder. The result was a transformation in Dutch street design which has rendered its public spaces among the safest in the world. With American traffic fatalities on the rise, activists are beginning to call for Americans to get truly angry about traffic violence.
posted by showbiz_liz at 11:10 AM PST - 25 comments

“The detainees prioritized by Trump’s approach included community leaders, doting parents and children: a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy in San Antonio; a grandmother described as the “backbone” of a Navy veteran’s family; a father of two in Detroit who had lived in the U.S. since he was 10.” 'No One Is Safe.' How Trump’s Immigration Policy Is Splitting Families Apart. (TIME) Created as part of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, ICE dramatically increased deportations compared to its predecessor, the INS. “Each deportation conducted by ICE cost taxpayers an average of $10,854.” (CNN Money) A mass-deportation strike force is incompatible with democracy and human rights, It’s time to abolish ICE.(The Nation)
posted by The Whelk at 9:39 AM PST - 58 comments

The National Geographic asked a preeminent historian to investigate their coverage of people of color in the U.S. and abroad. Here’s what he found. This story is part of The Race Issue, a special issue of National Geographic that explores how race defines, separates, and unites us.
posted by infini at 9:26 AM PST - 12 comments

AskMetaFilter, March 4: What songs does everyone recognize, but not know?
LifeHacker (with credit to AskMetaFilter), March 12: Here's a Playlist of Songs You Know But You Can’t Name
posted by kirkaracha at 9:15 AM PST - 80 comments

It's time for the 2018 Minnesota State High School All Hockey Hair Team. Does your salad have luscious lettuce flow? Is there always a fan blowing your locks back? Is your hair game as important as your hockey game? Then welcome to Hockey Hair, Hockey smiles, and members of the Caterpillar Club, looking to round out their extracurriculars for their college resumes. Hockey will always have short-hairs and long-hairs. Unless you don't have a head, it's better to be long-hair. Why? Because the long-hairs are livin' free.
posted by Elly Vortex at 8:01 AM PST - 16 comments

As Low-Power Local Radio Rises, Tiny Voices Become a Collective Shout. In 2016, Number of U.S. low-power FM radio stations has nearly doubled since 2014, and the Next Generation Of Local, Low-Power FM Stations Expands In Urban Areas. But what is Low Power FM (LPFM)? Frequently Asked Questions from the Prometheus Project, a Philadelphia, PA-area group that promotes "participatory radio as a tool for social justice organizing and a voice for community expression." Since LPFM license applications in the US opened and then closed in 2013, it's unlikely that a new application series will open. Learn More About Low Power FM, including a channel database and Wikipedia category [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:56 AM PST - 10 comments

In the first Chart Party of 2018, SBNation editor Jon Bois dissects the inner workings of March Madness, and looks at how realistic the idea of Cinderella stories are in the system. (SLYT)
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:29 AM PST - 18 comments

I watched all 629 episodes of The Simpsons in a month. Here’s what I learned: The show hates Lisa.

(Previously)
posted by divabat at 4:32 AM PST - 83 comments

RIP Sir Ken Dodd, comedian and entertainer, one of the last of the musical hall generation and dodger of the tax man right up until the end. [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:34 AM PST - 20 comments

"Those same pioneering humans who colonised much of the planet also experimented with an enormous variety of social arrangements." In a new article Davids Graeber and Wengrow argue that popularly accepted models of human history are now outmoded by archaeological findings. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 6:01 PM PST - 15 comments

Indigo Girls' fourth album in 1992, Rites Of Passage, is the apotheosis of their acoustic early years [YT playlist ~1h] Side A: Three Hits, Galilleo, [video,], Joking [video], Jonas & Ezekial, Love Will Come To You, Romeo And Juliet [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 4:04 PM PST - 34 comments

It's been a year since one dad, one toddler , a baby and a mum went viral. (Previous)
posted by threetwentytwo at 3:16 PM PST - 36 comments

This has been brought
to you by
Ctenosaur Video

NO Thanks to:
Miami Mike – I remember what
you did to me at DragonCon

A lot of new horizons open up [more inside]
posted by timshel at 2:50 PM PST - 9 comments

Why Are TV Detectives Always So Sad? [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 2:12 PM PST - 84 comments

Armed with a pair of GoPro cameras, Tim Heidecker and Eric Warheim (previously 1, 2, 3) capture the excitement of a day in their office. But as tensions mount, even the support of the biggest names in Hollywood can't prevent tragedy. Tim & Eric's GoPro Show: episode 1, episode 2, episode 3, episode 4, episode 5 [NSFW], episode 6. (Each episode is ~5 mins long.)
posted by Room 641-A at 2:06 PM PST - 1 comment

One electric game, a lot of hard work, and a whole lot of love. If you’re looking for the heartbeats of Hutterite women’s hockey, this is where you’ll find it.
posted by adamcarson at 2:04 PM PST - 3 comments

Every famous story inspires fan fiction, but Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908) has inspired an unusual number of book-length extensions and reinterpretations. I’ve spent the last few months reading some of those tributes, discovering in the process a darkness just beneath the skin of my favorite children’s book.
posted by smoke at 1:34 PM PST - 15 comments

In which the restaurant reviewer Jay Rayner visits a café, pays £110 for a meal for two, but doesn't even stay for dessert. “The artichoke is just so much mushy leaf matter, and smells of a long Sunday afternoon in someone’s overheated suburban front room ... 'Paola’s Market Veggies' arrive in a bowl, with a grainy, deathly 'carrot hummus' thickly smeared up the side, like someone had an intimate accident and decided to close the loo door and run away ... The jackfruit is described as being barbecued. This means it has been smeared with a blunt barbecue sauce of the kind they serve at pubs with a flat roof.” [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 1:17 PM PST - 69 comments

Today if you open a laptop or unlock a phone to type in Chinese, the first thing you’ll notice is how intent the software is on doing all your work for you. The letters typed on your keyboard trigger the on-screen display of several dozen likely possibilities, arranged in order of frequency. This seems so obviously computational it is a surprise to learn that it originated with the actuating keys Lin devised for his typewriter, and with the fervour of the typists in the early days of the Revolution.

[more inside]
posted by chappell, ambrose at 11:06 AM PST - 20 comments

Janine Hawkins' 2017 game journal. Hawkins is a freelance games writer (Waypoint, Polygon, others). She just released a pay-what-you-want PDF copy of her games of 2017 journal: "In a nutshell, any game I put significant time into (or that made a strong impression on me) qualified. From tiny aesthetic projects to huge AAA releases, I drew and wrote pages about the games I played both for work and for fun. And by the end of the year, I had 58 entries to show for it."
posted by curious nu at 9:05 AM PST - 3 comments

On March 9th, illustrator Candace Jean posted a photograph and question on Twitter in the hope of identifying a woman attendee at the International Conference on the Biology of Whales. [more inside]
posted by humph at 8:44 AM PST - 13 comments

Kate Wilhelm, award winning author of science fiction and mystery books, has died at age 89. Her son posted an announcement on facebook. [more inside]
posted by rmd1023 at 8:24 AM PST - 33 comments

Russ Soloman, founder of Tower Records dies at 92 [more inside]
posted by freakazoid at 6:43 AM PST - 36 comments

In an attempt to give the public some insight into how road maintenance decisions are made, Cheshire West and Chester Council tweeted an example of an, according to a professional measurement, insufficiently deep pothole. The tweet has since been removed, but not until after it got viral [imgur gallery].
posted by Vesihiisi at 6:41 AM PST - 34 comments

"‘How could two such different men, with such distinct sensibilities and styles, pursue their intellectual agenda together for more than 20 years?’ asked Francois Dosse in his 2007 double biography. The answer to this question – and the secret to their alliance – was their mutual distrust of identity. Deleuze and Guattari were both resolutely anti-individualist: whether in the realm of politics, psychotherapy or philosophy, they strived to show that the individual was a deception, summoned up to obscure the nature of reality."
posted by spaceburglar at 12:43 AM PST - 6 comments

my mom's cat was prescribed valium. now i get daily pictures of a cat who is high out of his mind
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:20 AM PST - 45 comments

Join Chris Funk of the Decemberists as he tours the country with us looking for the newest sounds of American music. • Keeping Hawaii’s Slack Key Guitar Music Alive • Portland’s Godfather of Soul • A Rock Star’s Unlikely Renaissance • The Lost Art of Playing Glass • A Master of Forgotten Music • Enchanting the Internet With Funk and a Fiddle
posted by MovableBookLady at 10:09 PM PST - 8 comments

Google Maps is Different in Different Countries - especially when it comes to disputed territories.
posted by divabat at 9:59 PM PST - 21 comments

So you want to read... let's say... Moby Dick or Jane Eyre onscreen. You have a few choices. You could read the hyper-annotated versions [PREVIOUSLY], and understand more of what underlies the text; or, you can let it float a clause or two at a time in Arial 72-point bold underlined font. Also available in other classics.
[A tip from the github page of the creator: add "?wait=[n]" to the URL to auto-advance forward every [n] seconds. A counter-tip from this OP: I don't know how to stop it in that mode, but it is hypnotizing.]
posted by not_on_display at 9:30 PM PST - 12 comments

“The family cloth” is a reusable alternative to toilet paper, made of rags, old t-shirts, sewn fabric, or purchased cloth wipes. They are mostly used for wiping pee, but some families use them for poop and periods. The practice (common until the modern era) is now mostly featured in eco-conscious and “frugal” housekeeping blogs and Etsy shops. Yesterday BuzzFeed published a sympathetic explainer about the wipes. (At the end, readers are asked to respond with “Good for them, not for me!” or “I’d try it at some point.”) Before it grows any more, let’s make it clear: “Family cloth” is not a life hack. [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:26 PM PST - 100 comments

The Video Game Soda Machine Project by Jess Morrissette “The Video Game Soda Machine Project is my attempt to catalog screenshots of every soda vending machine that has ever appeared in a video game.”
posted by Fizz at 7:28 PM PST - 16 comments

"After decades spent in a collective effort to minimize risk," educators in Britain are now deliberately bringing risk back to the playground, a move that "resonates both with right-wing tabloids, which see it as a corrective to the cosseting of a liberal nanny state; and with progressives, drawn to a freer and more natural childhood.
posted by zanni at 5:36 PM PST - 58 comments

What is an applicant tracking system? There are hundreds of ATS options available. Applicants tend to hate most of them. Employers may slowly be twigging on to the idea that poorly-configured ATSs (and a lot of them are poorly-configured) may be "killing recruiting efforts" and "scaring away top talent." [more inside]
posted by halation at 4:03 PM PST - 44 comments

The Kinder Joy consists of two individually packaged halves, with one half containing the chocolate and the other containing the toy. 
posted by Armed Only With Hubris at 3:28 PM PST - 40 comments

Rusted Root's first major label album, When I Woke, combined world rhythms and folk rock to become a platinum-selling album [YT playlist, ~1h] in 1994. Cassette Side A: Drum Trip [which on the album leads into], Ecstasy [video], Send Me On My Way [video], Cruel Sun, Cat Turned Blue, Beautiful People [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 1:37 PM PST - 21 comments

On the 10th anniversary of the 2008 financial meltdown, a Bipartisan coalition of senators is on the verge of rolling back the protections and regulations put in place after the start of the Great Recession (New Republic), with ‘House Republicans warming up to the idea.’ (The Hill). With Amazon wanting to be your bank too (CNBC) and Bank of America ending its free checking service (Slate), and old idea that had a revival around 2015 is bubbling back into consciousness: Postal Banking (The Atlantic). The Campaign For Postal Banking. But what about going further? What would divestment from large commercial banks look like? What is public banking? [more inside]
posted by The Whelk at 1:30 PM PST - 17 comments

Meet the campaign connecting affluent techies with progressive candidates around the country: the Great Slate. The Great Slate, a group of candidates chosen by Pinboard and Tech Solidarity's Maciej Ceglowski, has raised over $1 million for its nine first-time progressive candidates for Congress. "A good chunk of that was driven by security researcher Thomas Ptacek’s promise to stop tweeting about Eric S. Raymond, a notorious figure in the open-source community whose bizarre and abundant ramblings on everything including race and sex could be considered early forerunners of current alt-right strains in the tech community." [more inside]
posted by praemunire at 11:59 AM PST - 33 comments

Stephanie Syjuco (previously) is one of the artists on display in MoMA's Being: New Photography of 2018. Her Cargo Cults series "... revisits historical ethnographic studio portraiture via fictional display: using mass-manufactured goods purchased from American shopping malls and restyled to highlight popular fantasies associated with 'ethnic' patterning and costume. Purchased on credit cards and returned for full refund after the photo shoots, the cheap garments hail from the distant lands of Forever21, H&M, American Apparel, Urban Outfitters, Target, The Gap, and more." [more inside]
posted by hilaryjade at 10:52 AM PST - 1 comment

Dave Pollot buys thrift store paintings and enhances them with pop culture symbols. "Most are prints or lithographs," he told Bored Panda. "Any scratches or marks are carefully touched up and then my own visions are added." Before focusing on repurposing discarded thrift art, Dave painted more ‘serious’ architectural paintings and landscapes. Now, however, he's completely devoted to his new passion.
posted by philip-random at 10:43 AM PST - 20 comments

Behold, Jupiter's north pole! "The data being returned is unprecedented. And what scientists are learning is… well, weird. As expected. Jupiter is a weird place."
posted by dhruva at 10:38 AM PST - 12 comments

"Ignore this comment and the other comments, questions, and emails that follow about how his marriage might be breaking up, and would he be a hot commodity on the dating market..." "Respond in the affirmative, and you’ve prostituted yourself. Respond negatively, do not respond at all, or get a lawyer involved, and there goes your career." [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:19 AM PST - 22 comments

Yo La Tengo are once again playing requests for pledges beginning at 3pm US EDT TODAY (Sat March 18) on WFMU. Every year, Yo La Tengo perform requests live on-air in exchange for pledges, to help keep freeform noncommercial radio station WFMU (91.1 FM in Jersey City, NJ) on the air. This year is no exception. They will begin playing at 3pm US EDT today, and will be playing listener requests for several more hours.
posted by trashflow at 8:59 AM PST - 22 comments

It was just going to be for a few days. But he is now more than a year into knowing almost nothing about American politics. He has managed to become shockingly uninformed during one of the most eventful chapters in modern American history. He is as ignorant as a contemporary citizen could ever hope to be.
posted by mph at 8:12 AM PST - 93 comments

Originally developed for the TRS-80, The Hobbit (first location in real time) was released on the ZX Spectrum (1982), then the Commodore 64, BBC Micro, Oric, Amstrad CPC, Apple II and other home computers. CARRY ELROND. You try and get the treasure back home, and keep Thorin alive; avoiding the Goblin's Dungeon shortens the game. SAY TO THORIN "CARRY ME". Every object had a calculated mass. EXAMINE MAP. The text adventure, some locations including slow-drawing pictures, was written by Veronika Megler and Philip Mitchell in Z80. ATTACK THORIN. Veronika describes the development, and details further in an academic paper. A life-changing experience for some, published by Melbourne House, early editions included a copy of the book. PUT TREASURE IN CHEST. (title) [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 7:42 AM PST - 15 comments

The Duga (aka 'The Russian Woodpecker') was an enormously powerful soviet radar system, with one large installation situated close to the Chernobyl nuclear power station. It is now a target for base jumpers and extreme climbers.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:57 AM PST - 10 comments

The brutal world of sheep fighting: the illegal sport beloved by Algeria’s 'lost generation' – a Guardian longread on the blood sport of ram fighting.
posted by Vesihiisi at 2:25 AM PST - 6 comments

So it's "Mar10 Day," har har. How better to celebrate it than by looking at what PannenKoek, aka Scott Buchanan, the "A button challenge" guy (MeFi), has been up to lately? The channel to watch for that sort of thing is UncommentatedPannen, where you can find a pair of awesome videos detailing how SMB64's platforming collision detection works, the complete details of when characters blink their eyes, the internal units the game uses for its coordinate systems, everything about SM64's random number generator, the limits of SM64's floating point representation, what is pause buffering, the nuts and bolts of held items and the circumstances in which Mario will fall asleep. Meanwhile, the mobile versions of Google Maps will feature Mario in a go-kart for the next week. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 11:34 PM PST - 9 comments

Her tiny apartment is New York's most secret jazz club. And she's the direct descendant of Harlem's Rent Parties.
posted by MovableBookLady at 8:47 PM PST - 5 comments

Zoos, aquariums, and natural history museums on twitter are rating the animals on #rateaspecies. Adorable photos included. [more inside]
posted by moonmilk at 8:18 PM PST - 13 comments

[Hawaiian bobtail squid are] colonized by microbes. But they are selective about their partners: Of the thousands of species of microbes in the ocean, only one—Vibrio fischeri—is allowed to enter the squid’s body. Once inside, it begins to glow. And that glow, it is said, perfectly matches the moonlight welling down on top of the squid, masking its silhouette from predators looking up from below. The bacteria provide the squid with a kind of luminous invisibility cloak. But they do much more than that. [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:53 PM PST - 11 comments

“They just wrote, hey, Reese has picked your book!” she recalled. “And I was like, what do I do? I can’t respond to her and call her Reese. Should I call her Ms. Witherspoon?"
posted by oprahgayle at 6:01 PM PST - 3 comments

Much like with quantum physics, when looking at Super Mario Bros. at the very lowest levels, things stop resembling the phenomena we're familiar with and start to act pretty weird. No, I'm not talking about that Super Mario World-based demonstration of the idea behind the Many Worlds hypothesis. Instead, let's take a look at an in-depth yet highly accessible explanation of the weird, unintuitive stuff involved in a world-record speedrun of Super Mario Bros. [YouTube link. Warning: Half an hour long and interesting enough that you will probably wind up watching the whole thing.]
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:47 PM PST - 18 comments

The reason we can't have nice things in America in 2018 is that we don't want them. Think about the last pair of socks you purchased. Unless you spent upwards of $25 on them, they were probably made of Chinese acrylic. Getting them on your toes resembled an attempt to strangle a zebra with a sandwich bag. And afterward you couldn't shake the feeling that your feet were encased in a substance not unlike paint. They probably had a hole in them after a single wear. But, hey, who could pass up 12 pairs for $12 with Prime shipping? [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 1:57 PM PST - 166 comments

Bitcoin Is Ridiculous. Blockchain Is Dangerous You could even make a distributed magazine called Information of Vital Public Interest About Peter Thiel that would be awfully hard to sue into oblivion. It’s the marketplace of ideas. Literally. [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 1:01 PM PST - 39 comments

“Gothic Marxism then allows for these texts (Paranormal Activity, Insidious, Sinister, The Purge, Get Out) to be interpreted as sites of social production rather than a mirage to be dispelled but solutions to the concerns and material anxieties to which they respond and draw from seem far less evident. The shadow of the crash earlier this century is still haunting popular culture as the development and persistence of these films concerned with the issue of housing goes to prove. Furthermore, these cultural expressions of anxiety reflect the persisting material and political issues still plaguing the ways in which capitalist society handles the question of housing. “ - Your Home May Be Repossessed if You Do Not Keep Up With Your Payments: A Marxist Approach to Post-Recession Horror Film, Jon Greenaway. [more inside]
posted by The Whelk at 12:12 PM PST - 10 comments

Pick a country on the map. Pick a decade between 1900 and now. Lean back and listen.
Use Taxi-mode to create a round the world trip sampling the sounds of the continents. [more inside]
posted by Iteki at 10:47 AM PST - 8 comments

Wired is looking to the (near) future of farming in a series of pieces out recently: from the autonomous, multi-purpose "farm bot" that is capable of performing 100-plus jobs, from hay baler and seeder to rock picker and manure spreader, via an arsenal of tool modules [YouTube], farmer-assisting robotic lettuce picker and other advanced technologies to improve farm and orchard efficiencies (Wired video), to how new Phone-Powered AI Spots Sick Plants With Remarkable Accuracy and a quick look at 6 ways of extending the shelf-life of foods. The first article cites a 2016 Goldman-Sachs "Equity Research" report (PDF) that provides some context and forecasts for where there are current inefficiencies that this AgTech is now working to address. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:32 AM PST - 15 comments

Eastern Washington had cheap power and tons of space. Then the suitcases of cash started arriving. EAST WENATCHEE, Washington—Hands on the wheel, eyes squinting against the winter sun, Lauren Miehe eases his Land Rover down the main drag and tells me how he used to spot promising sites to build a bitcoin mine, back in 2013, when he was a freshly arrived techie from Seattle and had just discovered this sleepy rural community. [more inside]
posted by mwhybark at 8:44 AM PST - 66 comments

In 1946, Viola Desmond went to see a movie in the Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. Instead of the blacks-only balcony she was supposed to sit in, she sat in the main level of the cinema. She was arrested, spent the night in jail, and charged with tax evasion -- of the one cent difference in taxes between the two tickets. Her appeal was denied, but she helped start the civil rights movement in Canada with her actions.

In 2018, the Bank of Canada unveiled the new 10 dollar note, with the portrait of Viola Desmond. Her sister, Wanda Robson got a sneak peek. [more inside]
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 8:17 AM PST - 22 comments

The Morning News' Tournament of Books begins today! Meet this year's judges, check out the books, and take a look at the bracket (pdf). Unfamiliar? Here's a Brief History of the Tournament of Books.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 6:59 AM PST - 45 comments

Copywriter Chase Zreet would like to work on advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy's Sprite account. This is his cover letter.
posted by nerdfish at 5:30 AM PST - 32 comments

How do 11 people go to jail for one murder? The increasing visibility of such convictions in the last decade-and-a-half has caused joint enterprise to suffer from what the Prison Reform Trust calls a “deficit in legitimacy”. A Guardian long read on joint enterprise, 'gangs', racism and the justice system. [more inside]
posted by threetwentytwo at 3:26 AM PST - 13 comments

"We did have to collect magazines from a vicar once.” Clearing a house after a death in the family can uncover some surprises, sometimes welcome, sometimes not, and sometimes problematic. A specialist shop on London's Holloway Road can help with one particular class of head-scratcher: what to do with Uncle Harold's collection of gentleman's entertainment? And who's buying it thereafter? A study in subculture evolution from the unmentionable to the collectible.
posted by Devonian at 12:22 AM PST - 37 comments

Baba Is You Trailer
Gamejam Version Playthrough
Current Version on Itch.io
posted by Going To Maine at 11:39 PM PST - 7 comments

The U.S. Media Bias Chart.
posted by storybored at 9:58 PM PST - 53 comments

Margaret Scattergood and Florence Thorne were living in Langley, Virginia when the CIA moved in. The women reached an agreement with the federal government, wherein they sold their house to the Agency to be part of its compound, but could live in it for the rest of their lives. However, Margaret was a Quaker and "considered the organization’s mission to be in violation of her pacifist beliefs. She used her trust fund to financially contribute to antiwar causes. She lobbied Congress to cut the US Intelligence and military budgets. In the 1980s Margaret opened her home to Sandinistas from Nicaragua, while CIA supported the opposition.... More than once, Sandinistas arrived at the CIA’s main entrance in search of the Calvert Estate." [more inside]
posted by Cash4Lead at 9:44 PM PST - 7 comments

Carla Bley and her jazz band were in Europe in 1977 and they stopped by a studio in Munich to record 40-odd minutes of music [YT playlist] which was released in 1978 as The Carla Bley Band - European Tour 1977. The 4 pieces on the recording are fun, inventive, surprising, and sometimes even thrilling. Side A: Rose And Sad Song, Wrong Key Donkey [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:22 PM PST - 4 comments

A new ad for something or other [more inside]
posted by Gorgik at 8:40 PM PST - 32 comments

The life of a female billiards player is built on long hours, bad pay, and frequent travel. But at least you don’t have to share the table with men.
posted by MovableBookLady at 8:27 PM PST - 6 comments

FATBERG is focused on the construction and growth of a floating island of fat. Fat performs a unique and vital function as an energy reserve, stored within the body for times of scarcity. And yet, from a western perspective, fat has lost this function. It is stored and stored some more, but rarely used for its original purpose. Fat simply is.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:27 PM PST - 11 comments

Why the PDF Is Secretly the World's Most Important File Format
posted by Chrysostom at 6:59 PM PST - 91 comments

Splatoon 2’s non-violent gameplay makes it a truly subversive shooter [Evening Standard] “Where the likes of Call of Duty and Battlefield bring gritty and visceral warfare to the gaming landscape, Nintendo has once again shown its mastery in giving a creative all-ages spin on an established genre. Splatoon keeps the addictive gameplay of third-person shooters intact — select a weapon, run around a map, aim accurately and pull the trigger — but gives it an eyeball-frazzlingly colourful overhaul and removes character conflict from the equation. Rather than bullets, Splatoon’s tools are filled with neon-hued inks, and instead of battling enemy players the multiplayer mode sees teams tasked with spraying as much of the game map as possible with their team colour. The characters aren’t soldiers either — they’re vaguely elfish childlike creatures called Inklings, who for some reason can turn into squids and swim through their own coloured ink.” [YouTube][Game Trailer] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:22 PM PST - 31 comments

Guardian: Extreme frugality allowed me to retire at 32 – and regain control of my life. "Elizabeth Willard Thames abandoned a successful career in the city and embraced frugality to create a more meaningful life. It enabled her to retire at 32 with her family to a homestead in the Vermont woods" ... "It’s easy to discount your partner’s contributions until you’re standing side by side in the kitchen, watching them chop vegetables for forty-five minutes just to cook you up a stir-fry you love for dinner." (Caution for repeated use of the word 'frugality', and a 'tough crowd' Guardian comments section)
posted by Wordshore at 6:14 PM PST - 116 comments

I don't call myself a cowboy… That’s not a title you can just bestow on yourself, it’s something other people have to give you the recognition for. The popular saying is if someone the asks you if you’re a cowboy, you say “No, but I’ll do till one comes along.”

My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys, a Musical Documentary with Waylon Jennings.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 4:41 PM PST - 6 comments

Last year Northern Irish paramilitary Gary Haggarty pleaded guilty to hundreds of violent crimes, including many killings – while working for the British state.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 4:01 PM PST - 5 comments

New York Magazine’s cover for their latest issue is a package of stories that attempts 29 answers to a question that has grown both "more impossible and more urgent following the Parkland shooting, the president, and #MeToo." How to Raise a Boy. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 2:02 PM PST - 42 comments

Steve Francis: I Got a Story to Tell: I damn near cried when I got taken by the Grizzlies at No. 2. I was not about to go up to freezing-ass Canada, so far away from my family, when they were about to move the franchise anyway. I’m sorry but … actually, I’m really not even sorry. Everybody sees the business of basketball now. That team was gone. The only thing I’m sorry about is that I went up there and gave probably the rudest press conference in NBA history before they traded me. [slPlayersTribune] [Previously]
posted by gladly at 12:47 PM PST - 17 comments

In response to the student movement against gun violence, the American Public Health Association has opened access to all of the published research, commentaries, and essays on public health and firearms. that have appeared in the American Journal of Public Health. [more inside]
posted by entropone at 12:39 PM PST - 4 comments

"Since 1851, obituaries in the New York Times have been dominated by white men. Now, we're adding the stories of 15 remarkable women." For International Women's Day, in an attempt to redress its history of sexism, the New York Times is running a set of belated obituaries of women they failed to memorialize when they died. They plan to write more, and ask for suggestions.
posted by larrybob at 11:56 AM PST - 20 comments

Take a moment to consider this simple idea: there is nothing wrong with your house.
posted by mosst at 11:52 AM PST - 162 comments

“Do you live local, around here somewhere?” “Yeah,” she replies, doing most of the talking. “Ah, that’s nice,” Richard stumbles aimlessly in a script he wrote in advance of filming his imaginary wank fantasy. “Do you spend a lot of time in this area?” Seriously. That’s his follow-up to asking if she lives here. “I do, yeah,” the confused human replies, once again just dominating the conversation, as Richard begins telling the person who briefly agreed she knows the area that there’s a coffee shop around the corner.

Rock Paper Shotgun reviews PUA Video Game "Super Seducer." by John Walker [TW: All the worst PUA shit imaginable]
posted by Navelgazer at 11:01 AM PST - 78 comments

“Information has come to our attention that you are homosexual. What comment do you care to make?” During the Lavender Scare, LGBTQ+ military and government personnel were targeted en masse — especially women, Airman Second Class Helen James was one of them. Navy recruit and Drag King Rusty Brown gives an oral history of the panic and paranoia at the time. (PDF) MAKING GAY HISTORY podcast and transcript on the founders of Daughters of Bilitis, the first advocacy organization for lesbians in 1955. [more inside]
posted by The Whelk at 10:15 AM PST - 20 comments

It seems very fitting that Merriam-Webster chose this week to add "dumpster fire" to the dictionary.
Some of the choice chunks of flaming refuse today:

Mother Jones releases its first excerpt of Michael Isikoff and David Corn's upcoming book Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump .

The WaPo discovers that Erik Prince may have misspoken about the reasons for his January 2017 vacation in the Seychelles.

Hope Hicks has some email trouble.

As questions swirl around his NDA with adult film entrepreneur Stormy Daniels, the president is less than pleased with his press secretary's handling of the isssue.

The president has expressed mild interest in the discussions his staff have been having with the special counsel.

posted by murphy slaw at 8:06 AM PST - 2008 comments

Erik Ahlström was annoyed by the litter he saw in his new hometown of Stockholm, and set about to make picking up trash into a semi-competitive sport. Thus "plogga" was born, mixing the words "plocka" and "jogga," or "pick up" and "jogging" (Google auto-translate). Plogging is big on instagram, as documented by Buzzfeed, and Metro.co.uk’s resident fitness expert, Miranda Larbi, said plogging is similar to interval training and mobility training. Plogging has gained international interest in running communities, but it's not just about jogging. As noted in Teen Vogue You can pick up trash while walking your dog or heading anywhere, or while biking or even boating.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:31 AM PST - 29 comments

The "magical" herbs described in Homer's encounter with Circe may have been based on real plants. Also, a four and a half minute video depicting this theory.
posted by exogenous at 7:19 AM PST - 12 comments

Yesterday marked the launch of Crimereads, Literary Hub's new site dedicated to mystery, thrillers, and true crime. A welcome letter from the editors can be found here.
posted by carrienation at 7:17 AM PST - 3 comments

When and why we forget childhood events I remember things from my childhood but they seem to be ones that upset me. I rarely recall happy moments!
posted by Yellow at 6:17 AM PST - 30 comments

After re-examining bones found on the South Pacific island of Nikumaroro in 1940, and comparing them to written and photographic records of her physical measurements, University of Tennessee professor Richard L. Jantz believes these bones belong to famed aviator Amelia Earhart, saying that her measurements were “more similar to the Nikumaroro bones than 99 [percent] of individuals in a large reference sample,” thus supporting the long-held theory that Earhart died a castaway on the island. [more inside]
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 5:47 AM PST - 13 comments

Unbeknownst to each other, photographers Ron Risman and Eric Gendron happened to take almost the same photograph of waves crashing around the Whaleback Lighthouse in New Hampshire, USA. [more inside]
posted by Vesihiisi at 3:43 AM PST - 25 comments

2 Cats, ¹⁄₂ Box (1) | 2 Cats, ¹⁄₂ Box (2)
2 Cats, 1 Box | 2 Butts, 1 Box
1 Cat, 1 Box, 1 Basket | 7 Cats, 6 Boxes
7 Cats, 7 Boxes | 2 Cats, 1 Box (3)
posted by Going To Maine at 10:53 PM PST - 10 comments

Pearl Jam's fourth album, 1996's No Code, could be described as "the sound of five men chopping down The Grunge Tree". [YT playlist, ~50m] Perhaps more of an extended tone poem than anything else, it is introspective, poetic, rocking, sensitive, philosophical.... Mostly it is not at all Ten, Vs., or Vitalogy. And it is possibly the connective tissue between their overwhelmingly strong debut years and their ability to have survived for nearly three decades. Side One: Sometimes; Hail, Hail; Who You Are; In My Tree, Smile, Off He Goes [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:19 PM PST - 15 comments

Cody Rhodes lived and worked in the shadow of his father, Dusty Rhodes, one of the greatest professional wrestlers who ever lived. Now he’s carving his own path in his father’s memory.
posted by MovableBookLady at 8:21 PM PST - 6 comments

Samia Halaby, Commodore Amiga artist found her preferred medium later in life and uses it to create "kinetic paintings".
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 7:09 PM PST - 8 comments

UseYourClicker.com, home of epic rat tricksters (previously), also features Shorty the opossum, Horatio the hedgehog and Zed the coatimundi. But the stars are Kaiser the Bengal Cat, Nana the Border Collie and the aforementioned rats. In a contest of Dog vs Rat vs. Cat, Who Will Win? [various bright musics]. Many more videos on the video page.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:32 PM PST - 3 comments

Google celebrates International Women's Day with a special doodle featuring twelve short comics from women around the world, along with the invitation to create and contribute your own with #HerStoryOurStory. [more inside]
posted by Athanassiel at 3:05 PM PST - 2 comments

Ichiro Suzuki is 44 years old but he is not ready to quit playing baseball for a living. There is more going on here than just baseball. We have parental abuse, parental estrangement, OCD, and very strong dedication to his craft.
posted by COD at 2:35 PM PST - 25 comments

Inside Taser, The Weapon That Transformed Policing
Part I: The Toll

In the most detailed study ever of fatalities and litigation involving police use of stun guns, Reuters finds more than 150 autopsy reports citing Tasers as a cause or contributor to deaths across America. Behind the fatalities is a sobering reality: Many who die are among society’s vulnerable – unarmed, in psychological distress and seeking help.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:30 PM PST - 29 comments

WHY ARE THESE CHICKENS SO BEAUTIFUL? [more inside]
posted by maxsparber at 1:41 PM PST - 61 comments

If having kids is a full-time job, then having friends with kids is a part-time job where you listen to your friends talk about how having kids is a full-time job. Sow your oats now, because soon your conversations will revolve around things like whether or not the baby likes oats.

Are You Ready to Have Friends with Kids?
posted by griphus at 1:33 PM PST - 132 comments

#MCGA
posted by zarq at 1:01 PM PST - 13 comments

On Acquiring More Books Than It’s Possible to Read
posted by Chrysostom at 12:40 PM PST - 28 comments

"I was trying to turn off some lights and they kept turning back on. After the third request, Alexa stopped responding and instead did an evil laugh. The laugh wasn't in the Alexa voice. It sounded like a real person.”: Amazon Knows Alexa Devices Are Laughing Spontaneously And It's "Working To Fix It."
posted by not_the_water at 12:12 PM PST - 192 comments

Interview - Photography legend Joel Meyerowitz: phones killed the sexiness of the street — “In the 60s and 70s you could look at my street photographs and trace lines from the eyes of people connecting with other people’s eyes, setting up these force fields.” Today, what entranced Joel Meyerowitz about the street is all but dead. “Nobody’s looking at each other. Everybody’s glued to their phones.” From The Guardian, March 7, 2018. [more inside]
posted by cenoxo at 11:25 AM PST - 39 comments

“Would you like to share a hug?” "Are we living through a crisis of touch?" asks novelist Paula Cocozza. Along the way she touches on nerve endings, legal concerns, cuddle centers (previously), cuddlebots, wire mothers, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, hypervigilance, loneliness, and yoga. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 10:53 AM PST - 47 comments

"It’s not a list of the most popular Jewish foods, or the tastiest, or the most enduring. In fact, a number of the dishes on this list are no longer cooked or served with any regularity—at least not in the home kitchens or communal spaces where they originated—and the edibility of many others is... well, let’s say it’s up for debate. The point, instead, was to think about which foods contain the deepest Jewish significance—the ones that, through the history of our people (however you date it), have been most profoundly inspired by the rhythms of the Jewish calendar and the contingencies of the Jewish experience. That many of them are also delicious is obvious, and Darwinian: It’s how they survived as long as they did." Tablet Magazine: The 100 Most Jewish Foods
posted by everybody had matching towels at 10:43 AM PST - 33 comments

Trump doesn’t have a science adviser. This slime mold is available. Hampshire College has promoted a brainless slime mold to its faculty. And it’s working on border policy. (Here's the slime mold's faculty page, in case you're interested.)
posted by Cash4Lead at 10:38 AM PST - 15 comments

“The program brings workers, growers, and buyers together to ensure that farmworkers won’t be exploited. Buyers agree to only purchase tomatoes from growers within the program, who are held accountable by independent audits and a worker-driven complaint system. The program is also notable for being designed and enforced by the very workers it is meant to protect.” Florida Farmworkers Push for Fairness in the Fields (inequality.org)
posted by The Whelk at 9:50 AM PST - 2 comments

We're at the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's famous novel, Frankenstein. But the tabloid The Sun (UK) was horrified to discover that 'snowflake students' are correctly surmising that we can read the monster as the victim. Then Twitter and Buzzfeed got in on the fun and came up with other "snowflake" summations of famous literary works.
posted by TwoStride at 9:29 AM PST - 84 comments

MetaFilter loves to talk about Janelle Shane's weird and often hilarious neural network projects (previouslies 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), and that's all well and good. But what happens when the neural network spits out instructions that someone has to try and translate into a physical product? Janelle and the intrepid knitters of Ravelry decided to find out by teaching a neural net to generate novel knitting patterns. And yes, of course they named the project SkyKnit.
posted by Stacey at 9:26 AM PST - 13 comments

How to prepare an auto-icon for a flight across the Atlantic. [more inside]
posted by carter at 8:53 AM PST - 6 comments

The bricklayers work with ruthless efficiency, scraping and slathering mortar brick after brick, tamping each down to ensure everything is level. By the end of a single hour, with thousands of spectators watching, they have built a stretch of wall that would be a day’s work for a mason building at a normal pace.
posted by standardasparagus at 8:33 AM PST - 41 comments

What if we're wrong about dehumanization being the root of cruelty? The thesis that viewing others as objects or animals enables our very worst conduct would seem to explain a great deal. Yet there’s reason to think that it’s almost the opposite of the truth. [more inside]
posted by MiraK at 7:45 AM PST - 20 comments

Most nations have selected their singers and songs for the 2018 Eurovision Song Contest, through processes straightforward and controversial and more controversial and convoluted. Some qualifiers have been revamped; many can be heard on Eurovision Radio. A pleasant variety of genre will be performed in Lisbon, from the operatic dress of early favourite Estonia to the energy of Finland, the obligatory Country and Western of East Texas/The Netherlands, the Bond/Mad Max of Croatia, and the metal of Hungary. Sadly, performers such as Kamil Show (Armenia), Formerly Whigfield (Denmark), Heimilistónar (Iceland) and Þórunn Antonía (again, Iceland) failed to qualify. However, a few countries are still finalising their entry, including Sweden through their Melodifestivalen... [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 5:58 AM PST - 29 comments

Synchronous electric clocks count the oscillations of the mains current to keep time: After 50 or 60 cycles (depending on where you are in the world), one second has elapsed. This works wonderfully as long as the average mains frequency is constant, or—in practice—adjusted to compensate for errors. Things get a little tricky when 113 GWh of energy somehow go missing and all microwave clocks on an entire continent go slow… [more inside]
posted by wachhundfisch at 2:48 AM PST - 52 comments

In Osaka, there's a place called Hukulou Coffee, with owls and cats and haunted hats, and a couple of young friends named Marimo and Fuku.
posted by eye of newt at 10:21 PM PST - 14 comments

The world’s oldest known message in a bottle has been found on a beach in Western Australia, containing a roll of paper printed in German and dated to 12 June 1886. This bottle was part of an official drift bottle experiment conducted by what was then known as the Deutsche Seewarte, or German Naval Observatory. From 1864 until 1933, thousands of bottles were tossed from German ships to improve maps of ocean currents, of which more than 660 have been re-collected by what is now Bundesamt für Seeschifffahrt und Hydrographie (Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency of Germany). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:47 PM PST - 16 comments

Peter Paul & Mary made it to #12 on the Billboard Pop charts with their 1969 release Peter Paul And Mommy They also won the 1970 Grammy Award for Best Album For Children. [Full album ~35m, apologies for no playlist or full album link] Toy Side: The Marvelous Toy; Day Is Done; Leatherwing Bat; I Have A Song To Since, O!; All Through The Night, It's Raining [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:00 PM PST - 15 comments

The Broccoli Tree: A Parable
Some thoughts on what can be lost, and what can't be, when we share what we love [more inside]
posted by yuwtze at 7:46 PM PST - 8 comments

but wood wive hen manna hood wive hun,
musta dub mcwhaff an’ *bloop* muff aonouds

nahnahnah, dahdahdah,
nahnahnah, dahdahdah,
dladadadadadadadah
posted by auntie-matter at 6:46 PM PST - 37 comments

Eliota Fuimaono-Sapolu: Sad days at Auckland Grammar (Interview w/ Dale Husband, E-Tangata)

I remember this general knowledge question in primary school: “Who discovered New Zealand?” And I wrote: “Māori discovered New Zealand.” And that was wrong. I was told the correct answer was Abel Tasman. Even though there were Māori people already here in New Zealand, it was very important for us to learn that a white person was “first”.

[more inside]
posted by Start with Dessert at 6:10 PM PST - 3 comments

Mary Poppins Returns [Official Teaser Trailer] ““Mary Poppins Returns” stars: Emily Blunt as the practically-perfect nanny with unique magical skills who can turn any task into an unforgettable, fantastic adventure; Lin-Manuel Miranda as her friend Jack, an optimistic street lamplighter who helps bring light—and life—to the streets of London; Ben Whishaw as Michael Banks; Emily Mortimer as Jane Banks; and Julie Walters as the Banks’ housekeeper Ellen; with Colin Firth as Fidelity Fiduciary Bank’s William Weatherall Wilkins; and Meryl Streep as Mary’s eccentric cousin, Topsy. The film also introduces three new Banks’ children played by Pixie Davies, Nathanael Saleh and newcomer Joel Dawson. Angela Lansbury appears as the Balloon Lady, a treasured character from the PL Travers books and Dick Van Dyke is Mr. Dawes Jr., the retired chairman of the bank now run by Firth’s character.”
posted by Fizz at 5:42 PM PST - 79 comments

Jane Yolen's 365th book is being published today. Also her 366th. And there are at least nine more due out this year. (via The Big Idea series by MeFi's own jscalzi) [more inside]
posted by kristi at 5:22 PM PST - 14 comments

And what it tells us about marriage and death in the West.
posted by MovableBookLady at 5:21 PM PST - 15 comments

Women will make choices that benefits all first “Women, on average, were more concerned with fairness: that members of society should not go without what they needed, and that they had a role to play in ensuring that fairness.”
posted by Yellow at 4:18 PM PST - 16 comments

The Topiary Cat
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 1:14 PM PST - 17 comments

Up for a little music theory? Then let the delightful Aimee Nolte explain why "Remember Me" is a worthy winner (SLYT) of the Oscar for best original song.
posted by domdib at 12:58 PM PST - 13 comments

Deadspin writer Patrick Hruby lays out the case that the way we think about paying college athletes is in of itself fraudulent, and that we should start by rejecting the framing of the NCAA and instead look at players as being like anyone else. (SLDeadspin) [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:54 AM PST - 57 comments

The Long, Knotty, World-Spanning Story of String (SL Hakai Magazine, also available in audio format on the page).
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 11:33 AM PST - 10 comments

Researchers say there is link between media coverage and rise in mass shootings Studies conducted by data scientists within the FBI, various universities, and the American Psychological Association (Western New Mexico University) show strong correlation between media coverage of mass killers and the rise in mass shootings. [more inside]
posted by fantasticness at 8:27 AM PST - 137 comments

“It Was About the Insurance Fix” - How the nine day West Virginia teachers strike shows the need for Medicare for All.
posted by Artw at 7:44 AM PST - 38 comments

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) "supports research into our world’s frozen realms: the snow, ice, glaciers, frozen ground, and climate interactions that make up Earth’s cryosphere." The site has a wealth of information on the effects of climate change on these regions. The links in this post are focused on the north polar regions, including daily image and chart updates on Arctic sea ice coverage, interactive historic data visualizations, the Greenland ice sheet, and monthly blog summaries. [more inside]
posted by carter at 7:43 AM PST - 3 comments

"Let’s call it the “male glance,” the narrative corollary to the male gaze. We all have it, and it’s ruining our ability to see good art." Lili Loofbourow in the Virginia Quarterly Review. [more inside]
posted by Ziggy500 at 5:02 AM PST - 97 comments

The mystery of Zach, New Zealand’s all-too-miraculous medical AI. "With so many people seemingly impressed by this brand new AI, I’d been thinking about the way Zach communicated (over email), the way it learned, and those response times. Also all the technical talk like 'custom silicon'. I'd also heard from people who said that Zach occasionally had bad spelling. Keeping in mind everything I had learnt about Albi and David Whale, I began wondering: What if there is no AI? What if – keeping in mind Occam's razor – everyone was just talking to... a boring old human?"
posted by Paragon at 2:07 AM PST - 116 comments

A globe which lets you see how the continents have shifted during the last 600 million years [via Simon Kuestenmacher].
posted by Kattullus at 1:40 AM PST - 22 comments

Secret NYPD Files: Officers Can Lie And Brutally Beat People — And Still Keep Their Jobs
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:29 PM PST - 21 comments

"[M]y ambition to see a bear in my back yard has not been completely insane. By the latest estimate, there are about twenty-five hundred bears in New Jersey now. Wild bears. Black bears. And perhaps not a few that have immigrated from Pennsylvania in search of a better life. In recent years, bears have been spotted in every New Jersey county." John McPhee in The New Yorker
posted by bryon at 9:35 PM PST - 22 comments

A Dildo Maker Has Finally Determined What The Shape of Water's Fish Dick Looks Like. You're welcome. Bonus: Guillermo del Toro Spent Years Making Sure The Shape of Water's Fish Monster Had a Sexy Butt. De nada. But wait! There's more: Doug Jones Had to Poop Before Getting Into His Fishman Costume for The Shape of Water. Suksma mewali.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:59 PM PST - 54 comments

The Lonely Island shares their demo of their "overly ambitious" Oscar song 'Unfortunately, it wasn’t chosen because it was “financially and logistically impossible”, so for fun we thought we’d share the rough storyboards of what would have been a fully shot, star-studded music video of exorbitant cost.' Just like the blockbusters this song is an ode to. (Could have been) featuring the Four Chrises. [more inside]
posted by cendawanita at 7:32 PM PST - 7 comments

Steve Reich's 1983 composition The Desert Music was released on LP in 1985. Written for chorus, percussion, piano, and strings, it draws its text from poems by William Carlos Williams. The performance on this recording [YT playlist, ~50m] was conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas. Side A: First Movement (fast), Second Movement (moderate), Third Movement Part One (slow), Third Movement Part Two (moderate) [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 6:01 PM PST - 19 comments

Dadabots' Bot Prownies is the first punk rock album created by artificial intelligence. [more inside]
posted by roll truck roll at 5:35 PM PST - 24 comments

Every year, Jon Snow describes a popular song for the Big Fat Quiz of the Year and that's always been plenty funny enough, but over the past few years what has followed is pure joy... [more inside]
posted by elsietheeel at 5:34 PM PST - 21 comments

The Mafia is often cited as one of the main reasons why Sicily has lagged behind the rest of Italy in economic and social development. This column describes how in an environment with weak state presence, the socialist threat of Peasant Fasci organisations at the end of the 19th century induced landholders, estate managers, and local politicians in Sicily to turn to the Mafia to resist and combat peasant demands. Within a few decades, the presence of the Mafia appears to have significantly reduced literacy, increased infant mortality, limited the provision of a variety of local public goods, and may also have significantly reduced local political competition.
posted by bq at 2:01 PM PST - 36 comments

Need a little pick-me-up today? Try some proper rare vintage soul and disco from the label Athens of the North, a nickname for Edinburgh, Scotland, where the label is based. Euan Fryer, label head, talked about his favorite releases from his label with The Vinyl Factory back in 2015. Since then they've branched out farther, for instance two albums by Hampshire & Foat, one of nocturnal jazz bliss and and the other of hypnotic ambient folk sounds for a fictional fairy tale book, Galaxies like Grains of Sand and The Honeybear, respectively. Or just poke around their collection on Bandcamp and find your own jams.
posted by filthy light thief at 1:23 PM PST - 6 comments

There are two sides to every story; but when you run away from your family only one story remains. And that story, retold by the people you have hurt and horrified, becomes embellished and embroidered. You leave behind memories of your shortcomings and your mistakes, and you take the good times and the character strengths with you in your suitcase. Or that, at least, was what seemed to have happened with Prim. Saddest of all, as I was to discover, your story stops on the day you leave. What happens to you next – however brilliantly you do, whatever you make of yourself – happens in a parallel universe that your family are not connected with, not interested in, and not even aware of.

posted by Lexica at 1:06 PM PST - 9 comments

Why Latino Viewers Are Important for Networks Latino viewers are an increasingly important demographic for all networks. The Nielsen Company found that Hispanics in the US have over $1 trillion in purchasing power and represent more than half of US population growth between 2000-2010. Bi-lingual homes where both Spanish and English are spoken currently watch about 50% Spanish-language television, while English-dominant Hispanic households watch a mere 3% of Spanish-language TV. [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 11:48 AM PST - 3 comments

Americans Might No Longer Prefer Sons Over Daughters. New evidence suggests a shift, possibly because of “a subtle fear of boys and the trouble they might bring.” (SLYNYT by Claire Cain Miller) "Around the world, parents have typically preferred to have sons more than daughters, and American parents have been no different. But there are signs that’s changing. It may be because there’s less bias against girls, and possibly more bias against boys."
posted by crazy with stars at 10:46 AM PST - 72 comments

The End Of Work: A Ballad For The Universal Basic Income
posted by OverlappingElvis at 9:04 AM PST - 17 comments

Daniela Vega starred in 'A Fantastic Woman' (Una Mujer Fantástica) the first Chilean feature length film to win an Oscar (and the second award overall for the country after Historia de un Oso won for best animated short). She was also the first openly transgender presenter at the Oscars. This comes as the Chilean senate might be close to approving a Gender Identity Law which would allow her to have her ID card and passport show her actual gender and name. She's fierce, outspoken and takes no shit.
posted by signal at 8:22 AM PST - 17 comments

In this week's episode of You Couldn't Make It Up, (previously), after easily solving the Brexit Irish border issue, Theresa/Bob/Thomas borrows more Labour policies and delivers a speech/routine in front of a "carefully" designed backdrop. This time, a somewhat unrealistic and badly timed wall. Or chimney. Will she leave or wander or be forever trapped? (title)
posted by Wordshore at 7:18 AM PST - 98 comments

Retweets are Trash

A couple of months ago, I made a small tweak to my Twitter account that has changed my experience of the platform. It’s calmer. It’s slower. It’s less repetitive, and a little less filled with outrage. All of these improvements came about because I no longer see retweets.

[more inside]
posted by solotoro at 6:48 AM PST - 70 comments

“David Bowie Is,” an exhibition that unveils the rock icon’s complete artistry, expands as it arrives at its final stop: the city he called home.
posted by MovableBookLady at 4:13 AM PST - 18 comments

'kind, clever, exccentric and sweary' Michele Hanson wrote a column for the Guardian for over 30 years. She wrote about bringing up her daughter "Treasure", teaching, living in London, pets, and looking after her mother, a respected chef who lived to be over 100. A lifelong Londoner, her writing is wry, funny, humane and urbane. Her work is characteristic of one of the best Guardian commissioning traditions, the autobiographical column, often from non-professional writers, that shines a vivid light on seemingly mundane things. Obituary linked above, tribute from Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett. [more inside]
posted by glasseyes at 2:19 AM PST - 8 comments

Every autumn one of the world's most spectacular animal migrations takes place in a little-visited corner of Georgia. Tag along with one band of shepherds as they make their deadly, boozy journey from the mountains of Tusheti to the plains of Kakheti. [more inside]
posted by smoke at 1:43 AM PST - 6 comments

Proof That Christopher Pike Wrote Some Pretty Fucked-Up Books For Teens [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:30 PM PST - 86 comments

Sam Henderson's "Magic Whistle" blog usually highlights scans of comic books, newspaper comics and magazine cartoons (with a content warning for girlie magazine content), but on the weekend he gets animated with the Rainy Day Sunshine Fun-Time Sunday Low-Res Cartoon Show. The collected cartoons each week usually vary widely in age, familiarity and quality, but this week's group are all considered excellent by one standard; they've all won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:47 PM PST - 2 comments

Cory Doctorow, Michael Swanwick, Kim Stanley Robinson, Marge Piercy, Ken Macleod, Mark Bould, and Natalia Theodoridou start from here:

The central conceit of this issue of Big Echo is that Capital is a science fictional text. If you have any immediate thoughts on that (good idea, bad idea, obvious idea, stupid idea) we’d love to know them.

[more inside]
posted by kingless at 5:38 PM PST - 23 comments

What if Wakanda had an Olympic hockey team?
posted by rebent at 4:17 PM PST - 10 comments

"Five Women" from Chana Joffe-Walt and 'This American Life.' Vivian, Deanna, Onnesha, Kristen and Tana tell their stories – how their lives intersected with disgraced former editor of Alternet, Don Hazen, and how their earlier experiences shaped their perspective. This is an amazing story, riveting and terrible, and I'm so grateful to these women for opening up the way that they did, including Hazen's current wife, Vivian. [more inside]
posted by amanda at 4:00 PM PST - 33 comments

Running for five seasons from 1993 to 1998, Living Single is one of the most celebrated sitcoms in African-American TV history, ranking among the top five in African-American ratings throughout its run. Featuring the adventures of six young Black professionals (two men, four women--but especially the women!) and their lives together in two units of a Brooklyn brownstone, Living Single heralded a flurry of sitcoms centering young, free, and single roommates figuring out life and love in the big city. 20 years after the series finale, Living Single's cast and creator reflect on the show's run... and there may be a revival in the works!
posted by duffell at 3:44 PM PST - 7 comments

Found a dead... something... in the woods? Here's how you and your budding zooarchaeologists can clean up the skeleton. Need some help with identification? John Rochester on Flickr has hundreds of photos (may be a northern Europe focus)
posted by Helga-woo at 2:10 PM PST - 18 comments

After the discovery of seven Earth-like planets orbiting TRAPPIST-1 (a dwarf star 40 light years from us) in 2016 and 2017, the scientists studying the planetary system couldn't create a model of it that didn't quickly collapse until they took into account certain data about the way the system was formed. The orbital resonance of the system got others wondering what it would sound like if we could hear it. This was when "an astrophysicist, a musician, and an astrophysicist/musician decided to explore what happens when the rhythms and harmonies of astronomical systems are translated into music so they can be heard by human ears." [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:03 PM PST - 13 comments

My smartwatch constantly measures my blood sugar by sending tiny electric shocks to my ear. [more inside]
posted by queen anne's remorse at 12:10 PM PST - 53 comments

In this computer animated short, the space-rock duo DEATH VAN tours through a miniature world inhabited by surreal creatures that are haunted by a menacing and mischievous entity.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:34 AM PST - 4 comments

Cynthia Heimel, columnist who brought humor to hanky-panky, dies at 70 (Washington Post) "Cynthia Heimel, a humor columnist whose biting, ribald commentary on sex, romance and late-century womanhood were collected in books including “Sex Tips for Girls” and “Get Your Tongue out of My Mouth, I’m Kissing You Good-Bye,” died Feb. 25 at an assisted-living community in Los Angeles. She was 70. The cause was complications from dementia, said her son Brodie Ransom. Ms. Heimel had been diagnosed about a year ago." [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:52 AM PST - 31 comments

Can Metal Gear Survive without Hideo Kojima? [The Guardian] “Former Konami game director Hideo Kojima may be one of the most famous faces in video gaming. Not least because he puts himself in his games, a la Hitchcock, which for nearly the past three decades have been mostly Metal Gear titles. 2015’s MGSV: The Phantom Pain was a spectacular finale that offered real-life fireworks too, as Kojima and Konami acrimoniously parted ways. This breakup saw a reaction along tribal lines, with the fanbase generally siding with Kojima and blaming Konami. Something of the hangover remains in the reaction to Metal Gear Survive [YouTube][Game Trailer], which is a “divergent take” on Metal Gear in the studio’s own words. It transplants the series into another dimension for an online co-op game for up to four players – with, and it’s hard to suppress a slight sigh here, zombie-type enemies.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:47 AM PST - 13 comments

The Bard of Auburn: Getting Weird in the Long Valley - The Los Angeles Review of Books on horror writer and artist Clark Ashton Smith (previous)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:15 AM PST - 6 comments

Sir Roger Bannister: First person to run a mile in under four minutes dies at 88
posted by infini at 8:02 AM PST - 27 comments

Released on Summer Solstice 1999: Surrender [YT album, ~1h] was the third album from The Chemical Brothers: Side A: Music: Response, Under The Influence; Side B: Out Of Control [video], Orange Wedge, Let Forever Be [video] [short making of video] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:50 PM PST - 22 comments

The Tyranny of Convenience. "Given the growth of convenience — as an ideal, as a value, as a way of life — it is worth asking what our fixation with it is doing to us and to our country. I don’t want to suggest that convenience is a force for evil. Making things easier isn’t wicked. On the contrary, it often opens up possibilities that once seemed too onerous to contemplate, and it typically makes life less arduous, especially for those most vulnerable to life’s drudgeries. But we err in presuming convenience is always good, for it has a complex relationship with other ideals that we hold dear...." [more inside]
posted by storybored at 9:36 PM PST - 78 comments

Stiers, who was 75, is best known for his role as Dr. Charles Emerson Winchester on M*A*S*H and for a number of Disney animated roles including Cogsworth from Beauty and Beast. [more inside]
posted by Frayed Knot at 8:26 PM PST - 95 comments

Do neural nets dream of electric sheep?

Bring sheep indoors, and they're labeled as cats. Pick up a sheep (or a goat) in your arms, and they're labeled as dogs. Paint them orange, and they become flowers. And if goats climb trees, they become birds.

More neural net weirdness from Janelle C. Shane. [more inside]
posted by Lexica at 4:56 PM PST - 38 comments

A silkie chicken, purring
posted by Going To Maine at 3:47 PM PST - 11 comments

The Hunting Accident, a graphic novel written by David L. Carlson and illustrated by Landis Blair, follows the true story of Charlie, the son of Matt Rizzo, a blind Chicago poet, as he learns the truth about his father. As Charlie becomes entangled with small-time criminals and faces jail time, his father reveals that he was not blinded in a hunting accident, as he had always said, but rather, in an armed robbery gone bad. Incarcerated in Stateville prison, Rizzo was put in a cell with the infamous thrill killer Nathan Leopold, who taught him to read Braille and, by way of Dante’s Inferno, to love literature and to embrace life again.
posted by thelonius at 3:15 PM PST - 9 comments

Shock of the Mundane:

Conventional wisdom focuses on technological superiority as the key source of American dominance on the battlefield. Even though the United States is clearly still struggling at the strategic level in its fight against terrorists and insurgents, it is supremely confident in its ability to defeat these groups in combat at the tactical level, due in no small part to technological advantages such as total air superiority, remote surveillance, command-and-control systems, precision munitions, and night-vision capabilities. Observers are largely focused on these technologies – such as drones and night-vision goggles – and their potential diffusion to violent non-state actors. What has been overlooked in the debate over the combat potential of violent extremists is the diffusion of something much more rudimentary and potentially more lethal: basic infantry skills.

posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:58 PM PST - 50 comments

How Do Writers Get Paid? is a wide-ranging, informed, critical, and in-depth panel discussion on the ways authors are remunerated for their work, featuring copyright lawyer Zoë Rodriguez, SF writer Cory Doctorow, and literary agent Alex Adsett, moderated by Prof. Rebecca Giblin. The discussion takes place at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne, so has a bit of an Australian focus, but the US, Canada, the UK and, to a lesser extent, Western Europe, are discussed as well, and anyone with an interest in the topic will find much there. It can be watched as a video or listened to (podcast link).
posted by Kattullus at 2:21 PM PST - 30 comments

Kyle Kallgren (Previously previously) discusses everyone's favorite streamed depressive, Black Mirror and its place in the history of science fiction from Frankenstein to The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy . (19:08)
posted by The Whelk at 10:49 AM PST - 8 comments

The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates interviews Black Panther stars Chadwick Boseman and Lupita Nyong'o at Harlem's legendary Apollo theater. [1:09:05 video.] [more inside]
posted by cashman at 9:57 AM PST - 6 comments

Guardian: "From This Country to Reservoir 13, a new breed of TV dramas and novels are exposing tensions in England’s hidden corners." This Country: BBC iPlayer, trailer, Wikipedia. Daily Telegraph: "Is BBC Three 'mockumentary' This Country the best British comedy since The Office?" Guardian review: "This Country: perfect, horrifying TV for anyone who grew up in a village." Independent: "Not, that is, the Cotswolds the tourist folk like to portray..." Radio Times: "Pursuits chronicled in the first series included the chaos of a scarecrow festival, the ill-fated homecoming of an incarcerated uncle, and the search for a boy they bullied in their Year Six woodwork class." Bourton-on-the-Water: Cotswold TV promotional video, Wikipedia, Flickr.
posted by Wordshore at 8:31 AM PST - 18 comments

There seems to be no simple answer to Nakesha Williams's life of brilliant promise undone by mental illness. "She said she loved novels, and they discussed the authors she was reading, from Jane Austen to Jodi Picoult. She and P.J. chatted as time allowed, or until Nakesha veered into topics that hinted at paranoia: plots and lies against her. " [more inside]
posted by MiraK at 8:12 AM PST - 23 comments

“don’t take my devils away, because my angels may flee, too.” Being an active part of a community, I believe, could be helpful for many ails though it’s important for those with schizophrenia.
posted by Yellow at 7:57 AM PST - 4 comments

The real scandal of bacon, however, is that it didn’t have to be anything like so damaging to our health. The part of the story we haven’t been told – including by the WHO – is that there were always other ways to manufacture these products that would make them significantly less carcinogenic. The fact that this is so little known is tribute to the power of the meat industry, which has for the past 40 years been engaged in a campaign of cover-ups and misdirection to rival the dirty tricks of Big Tobacco.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:27 AM PST - 96 comments

Scientists have discovered a supercolony of more than 1.5 million Adélie penguins living on a remote chain of islands off the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula
posted by noneuclidean at 5:37 AM PST - 15 comments

A Brief History Of Goth, Radiohead, Emo and Metal animated by Joren Cull
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:11 AM PST - 7 comments

Elton John apparently can create music on-the-fly for any set of lyrics. Here he is challenging the audience to provide him with material and getting Ibsen's Peer Gynt handed to him, instantly creating a pleasant tune. Too easy, you say, with Peer Gynt being all lyrical and stuff? Well then, here he is being challenged by a different audience, getting an oven instructions booklet up on stage.
posted by Harald74 at 12:50 AM PST - 19 comments

Quite possibly, octopi are too stupid to take over the world. According to Slate, there are an awful lot of questionable and questionably presented stories on the intelligence of octopi. [more inside]
posted by Samizdata at 10:46 PM PST - 61 comments

"In the arid valleys of southern Tunisia’s Djebel Dahar region, people have lived for centuries in underground houses whose earthen casing provides protection against searing summer heat and winter winds. But in recent decades, rural depopulation has meant fewer people live in the homes, which are composed of rooms hewn into the walls of an excavated circular courtyard. The few remaining families say they are attached to the homes and the land or see no way of moving." [more inside]
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:03 PM PST - 16 comments

Recently noted in the briefest of passing comments "... in Donkey Kong 3, Donkey Kong fought an exterminator. Nobody really cares about that one..." except they do. The extremely rare, officially-licensed Donkey Kong game has finally been released to the Internet, and now the entire world can experience the bizarre journey of Donkey Kong 3: The Great Counterattack. Thanks to some dedicated fans, a copy of the Sharp X1 version of the game was dumped (with that process written up and link to the rom) and now you can play it in an emulator (Windows only, sorry). Or you can watch YouTube user Nintendo Era play (and talk) through levels 1-8 (36 min), levels 9 and 10 (4 min), levels 11-15 (20 min), and levels 16-20 (30 min). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:13 PM PST - 10 comments

“Firefighters lose their self-control and run into the fire instead of away from it. Night and day are often reversed: during a fire daylight is masked by smoke, haze, and ash; but nighttime is lit by firelight. Water is no longer a cooling, nourishing, healthful resource: snowmelt streams are tepid, springs boil, and water sources become undrinkable because of ash content.” A scholarly look at the stories told by and about early Forest Service rangers fighting wildland fire, from the Forest History Society [pdf]. [more inside]
posted by Grandysaur at 8:10 PM PST - 2 comments

It seems the Cold War is being fired back up (wait, what?), and all this revived nuclear posturing and recent events in Hawaii bring to mind 1987. That was the year Roger Waters released his second solo album, Radio K.A.O.S. [YT album, ~41m30s] -- Side One: Radio Waves, Who Needs Information, Me Or Him, The Powers That Be [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 7:31 PM PST - 18 comments

Asking the Wrong Questions: Reiteration and Doubling in David Lynch’s Lost Highway, Mullholland Drive, and Inland Empire
posted by spaceburglar at 5:54 PM PST - 9 comments

So How Does a Centaur Eat, Anyway? by Judith Tarr [Tor] “The upshot of all this is that because the Centaur’s delivery system for nutrition is a human or humanoid head and torso—therefore a human-sized jaw, teeth, and esophagus—the Centaur must necessarily live on human food, and its horse stomach will have been modified to accommodate an omnivorous diet. The Greek tradition backs this up, with Centaurs eating bread and meat and drinking wine. There is no way the conventional Centaur can chew grass or hay with a human jaw, let alone consume it in sufficient quantities to support the mass of its body.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:37 PM PST - 35 comments

What 19th & 20th century SRO living used to be and what it's morphing into, which is essentially dorms for new adults. After SROs became declasse and were phased out, they've come back in the form of the Commons Tragedy of the Commons [more inside]
posted by MovableBookLady at 3:38 PM PST - 84 comments

A look back at the looks on the backs (of sports uniforms, particularly player names). [via Now I Know]
posted by not_on_display at 1:44 PM PST - 25 comments

An article by art critic Jerry Saltz on Antiguan painter Frank Walter
posted by PussKillian at 1:12 PM PST - 1 comment

Override the standard new tab page with a random cat from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's online collection.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 11:25 AM PST - 10 comments

Welcome to the Age of Climate Migration Climate change is going to remap our world, changing not just how we live but where we live. As scientist Peter Gleick, co-founder of the Pacific Institute, puts it, "There is a shocking, unreported, fundamental change coming to the habitability of many parts of the planet, including the U.S.A." [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 11:00 AM PST - 42 comments

For their 160th anniversary, the Atlantic has highlighted some unique articles, stories and essays from their magazine archive and launched a Life Timeline. Enter your birthday and it will tell you how the world has changed in your lifetime. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 10:23 AM PST - 12 comments

Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor Is the Unsung Godmother of American Food Writing. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:45 AM PST - 7 comments

Uber and Lyft drivers in the US make a median profit of $3.37 per hour before taxes, according to a new report that suggests a majority of ride-share workers make below minimum wage and that many actually lose money. (The Guardian) “The companies are losing money. The businesses are being subsidized by [venture capital] money … And the drivers are essentially subsidizing it by working for very low wages.” Maybe the real question is, why is Uber a for-profit company anyway? (Salon) What is a Worker Directed Enterprise?
posted by The Whelk at 9:38 AM PST - 87 comments

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is coming back. I mean really, if anything merited a 42nd anniversary ... [more inside]
posted by epo at 9:13 AM PST - 69 comments

The great difficulty of understanding the English language, as explained by Ismo.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 8:57 AM PST - 7 comments

This Sunday, same old, same old...: Berlusconi's back, Renzi's center-left is down, Five Stars are on the up, the Northern League is Bannon's choice. Tensions are running high, but morale (and likely turnout) is low. Europe and refugees are on the cards. Someone's in it for free flights. Varoufakis to the rescue? (And: is Banksy running, too?) TL/DR: just watch John Oliver's excellent in-depth primer. [more inside]
posted by progosk at 8:39 AM PST - 30 comments

33 of the Weirdest Philip K. Dick Covers We Could Find from Literary Hub
posted by chavenet at 8:36 AM PST - 8 comments

BBC Studios is working on a six-part adaptation of Terry Pratchett's beloved Discworld. Tentatively titled The Watch, it should follow the coming Good Omens adaptation coming in 2019.
posted by hanov3r at 8:22 AM PST - 60 comments

"While no one was looking, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recently dumped most of its Oscars footage onto YouTube — hundreds and hundreds of clips from the show, including virtually every opening monologue, a mind-blowing treasure trove you can have a lot of fun picking through. What follows is a ranking of those opening segments, from worst to best, with a lot of great jokes along the way". 66 Oscar Monologues and Opening Numbers Ranked, From Worst to Best
posted by everybody had matching towels at 7:15 AM PST - 29 comments

People walking around Brixton, south London, on Wednesday night and Thursday morning noticed a very unusual photo campaign on the bus stops. Posters advertising films and tv shows recast with black actors. [more inside]
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 6:46 AM PST - 25 comments

"Weird Al" Yankovic: The Hamilton Polka (SLYT)
posted by uncleozzy at 5:24 AM PST - 56 comments

It might seem counterintuitive to keep building on land that is submerging. But Mr. Kerner did not see it as his job to take a 10,000-foot view. In the years since Hurricane Katrina, he had grown weary of being rebuffed in his quixotic campaign to encircle Lafitte with a tall and impregnable levee. He could rhapsodize all he wanted about preserving his community’s authentic way of life. The cost-benefit calculus — more than $1 billion to protect fewer than 7,000 people — always weighed against him. So he had set out to change it. His strategy was to secure so much public investment for Jean Lafitte that it would eventually become too valuable to abandon. Story by Kevin Sack and John Schwartz for The New York Times.
posted by bryon at 4:13 AM PST - 21 comments

Revisiting The Wire 10 years on [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:58 AM PST - 23 comments

From the Himawari 8 Japanese weather satellite: an animation of Earth from Geostationary Orbit covering October 2017.
posted by figurant at 12:04 AM PST - 11 comments

Cake bakers and trouble makers Lucy Worsley considers the history and future of the Women's Institute (now The WI) on the occasion of its 2015 centenary.
posted by Lexica at 8:12 PM PST - 5 comments

Canada’s Air Force Accidentally Bombed Miami…With a Raft
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:16 PM PST - 33 comments

Introducing Brigitte [YouTube] [Origin Story Trailer] [Developer Update] “The daughter of Torbjörn Lindholm, Brigitte is a support character. Her origin story reveals that years of working alongside her father in his engineering workshop helped her become an adept mechanic herself. Although Torbjörn has plenty of kids to go around, Brigitte is the one who really shined in the field, thanks to her prowess with building out defense systems. Brigitte uses her own custom-built armor, which helps protect her — and the rest of the team — in battle. That comes courtesy of her ultimate ability, a move called Rally that both quickens Brigitte’s pace and grants armor for those around her.” [via: Polygon] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 4:20 PM PST - 24 comments

Barry Crimmins, the beloved cult comic and advocate for victims of childhood sexual abuse, died Wednesday of cancer at the age of 64. Barry Crimmins was a merciless satirist and social critic whose caustic wit channeled a fierce progressiveness that spared no one. He took great pleasure in biting the hand that feeds, which made him a fascinating, unpredictable performer and the kind of loose cannon that makes sponsors uneasy. Crimmins could never be counted on to play ball, and that likely hurt his finances, but made him the kind of principled artist other comedians emulated. [more inside]
posted by yes I said yes I will Yes at 3:57 PM PST - 15 comments

"One-dimensional thinking relies on subtle oppression, on convincing people that they are free, on the provision of sufficient goods and services to distract them, on stultified civic discourse, and on the masses identifying with elites."
posted by spaceburglar at 3:47 PM PST - 21 comments

Richard Johnson is an architectural photographer that spent several winters roaming around Canada taking intimate portraits of humble ice huts. The resulting dozens of images showcase the wide variety of simple huts, ranging from patriotic to fandom-themed, minimalist to fancy, cautiously optimistic to uh, multi-purpose. (via longtime MeFi favorite Everlasting Blort) [more inside]
posted by Ufez Jones at 3:44 PM PST - 7 comments

To be continued...The Australian Newspaper Fiction Database , developed by Katherine Bode and Carol Hetherington, is a full-text, user-editable database of "over 21,000 novels, novellas and short stories published in early Australian newspapers." In addition to many Australian novels hitherto unknown to scholars, the database also indicates the extent to which British, American, and Continental fiction circulated in Australia during the nineteenth century. The corpus is drawn from the National Library of Australia's outstanding Trove digitization project. [more inside]
posted by thomas j wise at 3:05 PM PST - 2 comments

On Wednesday, at about 12:15pm ET, 1.35 terabits per second of traffic hit the developer platform GitHub all at once. It was the most powerful distributed denial of service attack recorded to date—and it used an increasingly popular DDoS method, no botnet required. [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 2:41 PM PST - 8 comments

We agreed that the sense of optimism over the untrammeled terrain placed the game at the start of the Obama presidency - Monopoly is a better game with real money and crime , playing the classic boardgame with updated rules that better simulate capitalism.
posted by Artw at 2:36 PM PST - 22 comments

An economic argument that there are too many small farms , especially in commodity-crop country. "Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton are still playing tug of war with the farm economy." Doesn't mention ecological externalities, which have their own problems with retirement.
posted by clew at 1:21 PM PST - 21 comments

If you can't make it to a beach or a desert to hunt for fossils, why not trek around your (closest) city? Check out the Twin Cities in Minnesota, wander throughout New York City, look closely at the Pentagon in Virginia, Buckingham Palace and much of the City of Bath, the British Museum and St Paul's Cathedral, and look around throughout the Netherlands. The coolest urban fossils might be right beneath your feet - you just need to know how to spot the fossils hiding in plain sight. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:54 AM PST - 25 comments

BBC News: "Every morning at 05:30 local time, 68-year-old Colin Huddleston opens the store, starts a fire in the stove in cold weather, makes coffee, and waits to play Pig. It's not even his store." The rule sheet on Forbus General Store Facebook. The fudge made in-store (2010), and a further video on the store (2011). Local features on the championship in 2014 and 2016. Other places to see in Fentress County. On Flickr: country hams, card table, sunshine, in play. The Forbus Wikipedia page.
posted by Wordshore at 10:53 AM PST - 6 comments

Do you even lift? The up and down world of YouTube elevator obsessives [via]
posted by jessamyn at 10:29 AM PST - 15 comments

"This book was brought with me when I made my escape from slavery in 1838, and is kept in memory of that event." [more inside]
posted by Snarl Furillo at 10:22 AM PST - 4 comments

Lawrence Herbert helped each color, shade and hue have its own place in the world, I wonder if he knew what he did ‪What I do professionally is mostly based upon what I think is best for the images, but sometimes the image will include something from a sponsor. Then I do my best to give the sponsor “their color.”
posted by Yellow at 10:18 AM PST - 6 comments

Tabook is a 2:40 animated short from Denmark about a closeted kinkster seeking fulfillment (of sorts) in a book store. Not sexually explicit, but probably avoid watching it at work.
posted by CrunchyFrog at 9:53 AM PST - 5 comments

"Gaming the lottery seemed as good a retirement plan as any."
The Lottery Hackers
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:30 AM PST - 36 comments

“The rogue’s gallery of right-wing supporters, from Milton Friedman to Charles Murray, is often unambiguous in its desire to use basic income as a knife to eviscerate the expensive insides of the welfare state. To different degrees, recent support within elite tech-chauvinist circles, from Peter Thiel to Mark Zuckerberg, might be similarly understood. How on earth could Marxists form a political alliance with the boy-king of Silicon Valley? Perhaps some elites see basic income as a pragmatic means to avoid the radicalization of a population that has seen little improvement in living standards in recent years, but others envision a Trojan horse designed to raid the citadels of Social Security, Medicare, and education spending.“ Debating Universal Basic Income - David Calnitsky (Catalyst)
posted by The Whelk at 9:29 AM PST - 57 comments

A brief history of queso, with a discussion of why Velveeta and Ro-Tel is good and other attempts at it have failed.
posted by Copronymus at 8:52 AM PST - 62 comments

How many stable planetary orbits could exist around one star? And how many planets could be packed into the Goldilocks zone (where liquid water can exist)? Let's use physics simulations to find out!
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 8:02 AM PST - 22 comments

Do the wrong thing: 90 years, 90 movies that should have been nominated for Best Picture The A.V. Club lists 90 movies that weren’t nominated for Best Picture but should have been. [more inside]
posted by kirkaracha at 6:58 AM PST - 74 comments

The News in Music (Tabloid Lament), is what Berlin-based Australian composer Thomas Meadowcroft calls a 'package' of imaginary television news music for symphony orchestra, presented live in the concert hall and accompanied by prerecorded text, spoken by professional newsreaders and played back through a central mono loudspeaker in the auditorium. Thomas writes about the piece in Resonate Magazine, and is interviewed on Australian radio. The piece celebrating the pervasion of orchestral music in popular culture via news broadcasts was met with boos and heckles upon it's premiere at the prestigious 100 year old Donaueschingen Festival, an event founded by Richard Strauss and contemporaries.
posted by adept256 at 6:05 AM PST - 4 comments

Kathy Acker interviewed the Spice Girls in 1997 at the height of their fame, just before they performed on Saturday Night Live. Here's a photo of them all together. BBC's Unpopped podcast assembled a three-expert panel to put the interview in the context of Acker's and the Spice Girls' career.
posted by Kattullus at 5:30 AM PST - 7 comments

Big Companies Are Getting a Chokehold on the Economy - "Even Goldman Sachs is worried that they're stifling competition, holding down wages and weighing on growth." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 2:34 AM PST - 46 comments