April 2018 Archives

April 30

“It’s by far the most complex piece on the whole record”

“The point is to try to come to terms with what the thing is, and what is it about it that’s so innovative and exciting. It’s been an incredibly influential album. Many people have claimed it as being an influential record, and lots of people frankly hate it and can’t stand it.”
Samuel Andreyev is a Canadian composer living in France. In this video he breaks down the one hundred seconds of “Frownland” by Captain Beefheart and its complicated structure. If you like dry talks, this is the video for you!
posted by Going To Maine at 10:43 PM PST - 9 comments

RIDE! ALL! THE! BUSES!

In 1980, two recent graduates of U.C. Berkeley managed to ride every one of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency's bus lines in a single day. Today, two San Francisco Chronicle reporters managed to repeat the stunt in 18 hours: #TotalMuni2018 [more inside]
posted by oneirodynia at 10:27 PM PST - 16 comments

"Yeah, I know Kossula."

Sometime before 1931, Zora Neale Hurston visited Plateau, Alabama and interviewed the 95-year-old man who was the last survivor of the Middle Passage. “I want to know who you are and how you came to be a slave; and to what part of Africa do you belong, and how you fared as a slave, and how you have managed as a free man?” His head was bowed for a time. Then he lifted his wet face: “Thankee Jesus! Somebody come ast about Cudjo! I want tellee somebody who I is, so maybe dey go in de Afficky soil some day and callee my name and somebody dere say, ‘Yeah, I know Kossula.’ ” 87 years after she tried to publish Barracoon, his story is now in print.
posted by ChuraChura at 7:24 PM PST - 49 comments

"It makes me really happy to know that people still remember the game"

"I think I was inspired by Nausicaä. I like that movie and watched it many times. I didn’t want to admit it, but I think it did affect my design. In regards to Dune, I actually only saw it for the first time a couple weeks ago. Many people have mentioned similarities between Panzer Dragoon and Dune, so I finally watched it. I was very impressed with the product design in the movie." Panzer Dragoon Saga: An oral history
posted by Bangaioh at 6:20 PM PST - 6 comments

The Queen of Robots Preparing for a Personal Battle

Simone Giertz has a brain tumor. She explained in an email to her Patreon subscribers.
Good news in all of this is that it's probably noncancerous, and there's a very small risk that I'll die from it. Bad news is, well yeah, I have a brain tumor.
I really feel like I should put more jokes in here to make sure that you know that I'm alright. Because I really am.
posted by Miss Cellania at 5:14 PM PST - 32 comments

From the streets of Fallujah to Savannah

We have to stop treating people like we’re in Fallujah. In time, he came to believe that the most meaningful application of his training and expertise—the only way to exemplify his beliefs about American security, at home and abroad—was to become a community police officer in Savannah, where he grew up.
posted by bitmage at 4:28 PM PST - 15 comments

nom nom noNOM NOM NOM

PetaPixel: This Photographer Caught a Bird That Caught a Shark That Caught a Fish
posted by oulipian at 3:42 PM PST - 16 comments

Neta Snook, Pioneering Aviator & Earhart's Instructor

What it took to learn to fly in the early 1900s. Lots of interesting info on what Ames Iowa was like, such as wooden squares as paving, and how she made her plane. Here's the link to the MessyNessy Snook which has the best photos.
posted by MovableBookLady at 1:54 PM PST - 7 comments

linear thought struggles with warped axes of time and space

The first film ever streamed on the internet is kind of crazy: Beekeeping, alien planets, and the limits of narrative as technology. [more inside]
posted by sapagan at 1:53 PM PST - 24 comments

You’ve gotta sober up, Sydney Pollack wants to talk to you.

"There is no explanation for how or why Helen, out of all the women running for her train in all of London, gets to experience these two lives. There is no fairy godmother or Virgin Mary to thank—no ghosts of Christmas past, no good witch with a magic spell. The film trusts the audience completely to understand this is wish fulfillment in its purest form: the desire to check in with all our parallel selves, to see those near-misses and almost-was and what-ifs given back through movie magic and nothing more." The Almosts and What-ifs of ‘Sliding Doors’
posted by everybody had matching towels at 1:36 PM PST - 12 comments

Bushido: Way of Total Bullshit

"The term bushido calls forth ghosts of Japan's hallowed samurai class. A class so bent on preserving honor, they'd rather slit their own bellies in ritualistic suicide than live a shamed existence. In The Last Samurai, bushido melds with Nathan Algren's soul, curing the troubled American of alcoholism, war trauma, and self-loathing. What powerful medicine! A reinvigorated, purified Algren turns his back on his employers to join rebel samurai bent on defending bushido, their dignified honor-code of loyalty, benevolence, etiquette, and self-control. At least, that's what popular culture would have us believe. In reality the term bushido went unrecognized until the early twentieth century, long after Nathan Algren's fictitious character joined the factual Satsuma Rebellion and years after the ousting of the samurai class. In all likelihood samurai never even uttered the word."
posted by josher71 at 12:51 PM PST - 26 comments

How K-pop became a propaganda tool

Ahead of Friday’s intra-Korean summit, the South put an end to its pop music assault at the border. But the country’s catchy music is a potent psychological weapon.
posted by bq at 11:50 AM PST - 5 comments

An interview with Dr Chuck Tingle

Nothing in the Rulebook interviews Dr Chuck Tingle. Includes the best top ten list for a good life that I have ever seen.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:52 AM PST - 26 comments

Only the Best!

Best Products is a now-defunct catalog showroom chain that had some really cool and really unusual store designs.
posted by DRoll at 10:32 AM PST - 40 comments

When a Chatbot Becomes Your Best Friend

After one young entrepreneur lost a loved one, she created an avatar to help her grieve. Now her AI platform helps millions of users find their own digital besties.
posted by BekahVee at 10:23 AM PST - 24 comments

Die Welt als Wald

Palm Oil, Peat Fires, Nutella and the Anthropocene [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:14 AM PST - 6 comments

A prequel to "Grey Gardens"

Ok, if you're a cult follower of Grey Gardens, then you know this already. (If not, some people think that you should see the HBO drama first to get a good introduction.) You know that in 1972, the Maysles brothers shot some footage of Lee Radziwill and her relatives with the idea of making a documentary about the Bouvier childhood. You know that the Maysles decided that her aunt and cousin made better footage, and Grey Gardens was born. Long thought lost, this early footage has now been turned into an 80-minute film called "That Summer," opening May 18. Here's the trailer, and the Variety review. But you knew that.
posted by Melismata at 8:36 AM PST - 11 comments

Restoring a market economy took priority over human rights and justice

“Within the Mont Pelerin Society, the problem of how to end colonialism without destroying property rights was much debated. The English economist William Hutt imagined that voting power in postapartheid South Africa could be made proportional to economic weight. Milton Friedman agreed that one man, one vote would be terrible for South Africa, and Hayek worried that putting sanctions on South Africa would upset the global order. They didn’t favor apartheid, but they were against almost anything that might bring it to an end.” - WORLDS APART - Patrick Iber discusses the roots and causes of neoliberal/“Post-Ford” ideaology, it’s growth in European economic circles, and it’s destabling effects on nations and democracies worldwide. (The New Republic)
posted by The Whelk at 7:59 AM PST - 15 comments

The Diego Rivera of Pittsburgh

During two periods in 1937 and 1941, Croatian artist Maxo Vanka was commissioned to provide murals for the inside of St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church in Millvale, PA, across the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh. These striking, affecting murals "pay tribute to faith while expressing his passionate beliefs about social justice, injustice, [and] the horrors of war." [more inside]
posted by soren_lorensen at 7:26 AM PST - 9 comments

No Mr. Bond, I expect you to bomb.

Shirley Bassey? Pulp? Alice Cooper? All writing Bond themes? What could possibly go wrong? [Cue ejector seat.] Better than what they picked? You be the judge! The James Bond 007 themes that didn't make it. [Thanks deezil for the title.]
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 6:50 AM PST - 30 comments

God Is Black

Theologian James Cone has died. The founder of black liberation theology, Cone sought to interpret Christianity through the lens of the black freedom struggle in America, showing that being true to the Gospel requires standing against racial oppression. Cone was the author of several books, including The Cross and the Lynching Tree and God of the Oppressed. A remembrance by Adelle Banks. From 2015, an introduction to Cone's work by Daniel José Camacho.
posted by Cash4Lead at 6:19 AM PST - 16 comments

Trompe L'oeil

Étienne Terrus was a French painter, one of the precursors of Fauvism. He has a museum dedicated to him in his birthplace of Elne. Unfortunately it has just been discovered that 82 of his paintings there - over half - are fakes. [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:19 AM PST - 26 comments

MetaFilter Cannot Even Save You From MetaFilter

Things That Cannot Save You is a semi-Lovecraftian "catalog of your doom", a collection of images and screengrabs of things the curator wishes to point out will provide no protection from Cthulhu or other horrors of the Great Old Ones. Among the 'things' are Delicious Snack Cookies with Creamy Filling, DVD and Book Sets, Drugs of Inferior Quality, Micky Dolenz (although he is clearly very groovy), These Cats, The Family Circus, Hair Rental, the Atheist Agenda, Floating Pie Head Lady, Star Trek Next Generation memes, Candelabra Hats, Colored Pills and Capsules, A Sassy Mug, Oscar Mayer All Meat Wieners with Mild Barbecue Sauce Packed in Brine and Amphibious Cars... and those are just from the first week of the last two years. So, dive in and have fun, just don't expect to be saved. [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:11 AM PST - 19 comments

April 29

Don't tell Spider-Man your secrets (and don't trust the Hulk)

Now that the movie's out, we can talk more freely about Avengers: Infinity War, and the fact that Tom Holland, the current Spider-Man, wasn't allowed to read the script because everyone knew he is terrible at keeping secrets. He even let slip the poster design and movie release date in a live unboxing video that was a fake-not fake leak/present from fellow secret sharer, Mark Ruffalo, who accidentally livestreamed part of Thor: Ragnarok on Instagram. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:45 PM PST - 44 comments

Mother Hitton's Vittle Kittons

Russian artist Ksenia Photoshops cats into pictures of food. That is all.

Instagram | Facebook | Redbubble
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:51 PM PST - 16 comments

“The downside, of course, is the lack of excitement and variability.”

Is it weird to eat the same sandwich for lunch every day? [The Guardian] “Did you eat the same thing for today’s lunch at work that you ate yesterday? We ask because a detail about sandwiches was one of the odder elements of a story about a Westminster security alert. A woman accused of meeting men via a “sugar daddy” website while working for parliament told the Daily Mirror that the housing minister, Dominic Raab, has exactly the same thing for lunch every day: a Pret a Manger chicken caesar and bacon baguette, with a pot of fruit and the same smoothie. But is this really that unusual?”
posted by Fizz at 5:17 PM PST - 108 comments

The Purple Syllabus

"The #PurpleSyllabus presents essential topics, readings, and multimedia related to Prince. Prince’s impact and influence spreads across nearly all aspects of society and culture. This syllabus presents works written by scholars and journalists across diverse topics. Our hope is that this syllabus will serve as a resource for teachers and curriculum designers looking to infuse their classrooms and courses with Prince content." [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 5:13 PM PST - 2 comments

"I have no thought of escaping"

Inside an Association for Protection and Assistance to Convicts prison.
posted by queen anne's remorse at 12:59 PM PST - 6 comments

Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming. It’s Time for That to Change.

But how do we really know that too many developers experience Stack Overflow as an unwelcoming or hostile place? Well, the nice thing about problems that relate to how people feel is that finding the truth is easy. Feelings have no “technically correct.” They’re just what the feeler is telling you. Let’s reject the false dichotomy between quality and kindness.
posted by cgc373 at 10:36 AM PST - 194 comments

Ain't no smilin' faces / Lying to the races...

Ain't no smilin' faces / Lying to the races..." [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 9:05 AM PST - 12 comments

Virtual Dating Assistant

"Every morning I wake up to the same routine. I log into the Tinder account of a 45-year-old man from Texas—a client. I flirt with every woman in his queue for 10 minutes, sending their photos and locations to a central database of potential 'Opportunities.' For every phone number I get, I make $1.75."
posted by clawsoon at 6:26 AM PST - 105 comments

WELL NONE OF YOU WILL LET ME HAVE CHICKENS

Me: YOU CAN’T HAVE A SECRET PARROT IN THE HOUSE. SLTwitter.
posted by MartinWisse at 4:57 AM PST - 70 comments

Printing without the press.

Woodblock. Transfer. Linocut. Woodcut. Linocut. Linocut.
posted by spaceburglar at 1:54 AM PST - 11 comments

April 28

Dig It!

The ninth album by Yes, 1978's Tormato, was the first album produced collectively by the band. It's one of the rare albums to include a drum solo in one of its songs. It was also the last Yes album to include Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman for many years. Side A: Future Times/Rejoice; Don't Kill The Whale [video]; Madrigal [video]; Release, Release [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 11:27 PM PST - 35 comments

The Man in The Hat

Larry Harvey, founder of Burning Man, has died. Harvey, 70, had suffered a massive stroke a few weeks ago. He is remembered by many in the Burning Man community, including his official obituary and in this photo essay from his brother, as well as by news outlets including The New York Times.
posted by Amplify at 9:00 PM PST - 29 comments

West Virginia's Unlikeliest Politician

A liberal cab driver. How one scruffy, folk-singing hippie took on the political establishment in Trump Country…and won.
posted by MovableBookLady at 8:34 PM PST - 5 comments

Weekend weirdness: Vladimir Cauchemar's Aulos music video

Back in December, an artist going by Vladimir Cauchemar released a single track called Aulos (Soundcloud), a "flute-trap" track released on Ed Banger Records by a mysterious individual often referred to as a Russian recorder artist. And then there's the music video, which starts off like a slightly rough personal video of a guy playing an invisible flute, and then it gets weird. [Bonus Ed Banger symphonic covers inside] [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 7:16 PM PST - 3 comments

You can do it, Brucey!

KINOSHITA Yuuka is a Japanese Oogui (big eater).
Mr. Donuts' Halloween Snoopy Specials | 8397kcal
Giant sushi balls for Tanabata | 4134kcal [3kg]
Deep frying ten 7/11 rice balls
30 Siretoco Bear Face Donuts | 8150kcal [4.3kg]
400 dumplings | 19000kcal [8.5kg]
Steak with rice and miso soup | 10300 kcal [4kg]
Sakura Strawberry Pink Mochi Frappuccino! Starbucks 2018 Spring Items! | 4005kcal
posted by womb of things to be and tomb of things that were at 6:23 PM PST - 12 comments

We value you as a user. Please continue to hold. And visit our website!

The Standard Bearer: Tim Carleton & Darrick Deel's "Opus No. 1"
Classic 1980-90's Lite Jazz Hold Music
What did people do before Hold Music?
[more inside]
posted by not_on_display at 6:18 PM PST - 20 comments

“Good afternoon, HAL. How's everything going?”

Revisit One of the Most Influential Films of All Time With 2001: A Space Odyssey's 70mm Trailer [YouTube] “50 years ago, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey debuted. It became a classic for its exploration of film style, for its technological advances in cinema, and for the birth of a new sub-genre within science fiction and narrative storytelling. Now, audiences can experience the phenomenon that started a film movement and affected all films to come after. Oscar-nominated director Christopher Nolan will introduce the 70mm rerelease of 2001 at its Cannes premiere on May 12.” [via: Paste Magazine]
posted by Fizz at 4:28 PM PST - 42 comments

The fire you like so much in me

Liz Phair, 25 years on from Guyville.
posted by Chrysostom at 3:15 PM PST - 31 comments

I’m building a robot boyfriend—and you can, too

Fei Liu's Three Laws Of Love Robotics:
  1. A love machine does not need to be humanoid, but it must elicit and invite gestures of care.
  2. A love machine will be built with open-source technology.
  3. A love machine doesn’t always obey.
Website | Vimeo | Twitter
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 3:14 PM PST - 15 comments

My Generation is Never Going to Have That

Seattle’s red-hot tech economy, led by companies such as Amazon ... has filled the city with an army of well-paid workers bidding up the price of housing. But that tech-fueled demand has tended to overshadow the other driver: insufficient supply. [more inside]
posted by MoonOrb at 9:10 AM PST - 159 comments

Easy! Easy! Easy!

For over twenty years of Saturday tea times in the UK, World Of Sport Wrestling on ITV was essential viewing for grapple fans until interest in the British version of the sport waned and it was taken off the air... but interest in UK wrestling has grown in recent years and now World Of Sport Wrestling is back! [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 6:52 AM PST - 6 comments

The McNamara Fallacy

Robert S. McNamara (previously, previouslier, previousliest, not previously) was known for his love of measuring progress using numbers - most notoriously, body counts in the Vietnam War. In 1972, Daniel Yankelovich outlined the four steps in the McNamara Fallacy. It has since been recognized as a problem in religion, medicine (PDF), economics, education, advertising, big data, business, and - back to our starting place - war. [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 6:17 AM PST - 61 comments

A Ripping Tale of Algae and Typos

A British scientist who was not a code-breaker was sent in error to Bletchley Park in WWII. It turned out to be a very good mistake. Twitter thread by Florence Schechter: read to the end for more formal but less entertaining references.
posted by hawthorne at 5:12 AM PST - 14 comments

April 27

Pamper Me To Hell and Back

Hera Lindsay Bird, New Zealand Poetry Star, interrogates capitalism and love in her recent poem Pyramid Scheme. Why aren't they called triangle schemes? Her most recent collection, published this year, is titled Pamper Me to Hell and Back. [more inside]
posted by 3zra at 9:03 PM PST - 9 comments

Amsterdam's Bridge Houses Become Tiny Hotel Rooms

From the 1600s to the 2000s, these structures helped control the canals. Now they've become redundant and a hotel company has begun modifying them into hotel rooms, each different, each alluring. [more inside]
posted by MovableBookLady at 8:31 PM PST - 15 comments

NetHack 3.6.1

NetHack 3.6.1 has been released. Release notes. Downloads (so far the only ready-to-run version is Windows). Usenet announcement on Google Groups. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 8:13 PM PST - 60 comments

National Memorial for Peace and Justice

Inside the memorial to victims of lynching. The first national memorial to victims of lynching opened yesterday in Montgomery, Alabama. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice commemorates 4,400+ black people who were slain in lynchings and other racial killings between 1877 and 1950. previously previouslier
posted by likeatoaster at 7:30 PM PST - 27 comments

The history of Shari'a

The History of the Shariʿa. An article on the evolution of Islamic law in Lapham's Quarterly by Mohammad Fadel. [more inside]
posted by tavegyl at 6:19 PM PST - 3 comments

Some Avengers Assembly Required

The BIG MOVIE Avengers: Infinity War has generated a ton of press, commentary and spoilers ([REDACTED] DIES!), and a lot of parody & satire even before the official premiere. The (IMO) funniest ones address the absurdly large collection of super-characters by making it even more absurd, like College Humor's animated "Infinite Avengers" bit, adding nearly every Marvel character ever* and Nerdist's "Ultimate" trailer remix that "crossovers" with nearly everything Disney owns**. [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 4:10 PM PST - 24 comments

“'BattleTech' is the rare tactics game that makes attrition a tool,”

'BattleTech' Revives the Classic Mech Franchise in All Its Grueling Glory [Waypoint] “I’m talking about love here, and what I love about BattleTech is that it’s a game you feel in your gut, where you help topple a totalitarian regime by leaving a trail of broken and twisted mechs, as well as their dead pilots, littered across the stars. And they don’t go down easily, like playing pieces that you take off the board after a good move. They walk through showers of missile fire, shudder under the weight of cannon shot, get slashed to pieces by massive laser beams, and finally pummeled into the ground by other mechs’ massive metallic arms. This isn’t XCOM, where the point is to avoid getting hit while you surgically dismantle enemy squads piecemeal. This is war.” [YouTube] [Game Trailer] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 3:36 PM PST - 85 comments

The cold Locke-Voltaire equations

Leaving populations to boom and bust on their own is currently gruesome in the Netherlands, economically advantageous in Sussex, and contentious where reintroduced Yellowstone bison can be hunted. [more inside]
posted by clew at 2:52 PM PST - 20 comments

'68 at 50

The New York Review of Books reflects on the political events of 1968 and their legacy fifty years on: Power to the Imagination by Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Claus Leggewie; Enoch, Bageye and Me by Colin Grant; When the Communist Party Stopped a French Revolution by Mitchell Abidor. Also, from CNRS, an interview with historian Michelle Zancarini-Fournel: 1968: a Turning Point in History?
posted by sapagan at 2:14 PM PST - 6 comments

pass the trash

"I’ve seen what happens when we pretend that these guys can simply disappear once they’ve been pushed out. In my experience, they resurface elsewhere, often to prey on others. That’s especially true of men who aren’t famous enough to make headlines, and whose career moves aren’t subjected to constant scrutiny. And so if we want the #MeToo movement to be about more than just which celebrity will be the next to fall, or whose comeback must be stopped — if we want it to lead to real, lasting and widespread cultural change — we need to talk. About what we do with the bad men."
posted by everybody had matching towels at 1:24 PM PST - 79 comments

"Who today remembers Harriet Miers, never mind her hair-do?"

The Very Specific 2006-ishness of Those Alleged Joy Reid Posts [Richard Kim, The Nation]
"I don’t know if Reid did or did not write these posts, and I do not have the technical expertise to comment on the central question about hacking around which this controversy now revolves. But I was a gay blogger and a prolific reader of blogs, gay and political and otherwise, during the period in question. And when I forced myself to review the posts, many of them were instantly recognizable to me as something a liberal blogger in those years could have written. In fact, the more I put on my 2006-ish hat, the more unexceptional they seemed to me." [Context: Joy Reid Doubles Down: Homophobic Posts ‘Hacked,’ ‘Fraudulent’]
posted by Atom Eyes at 12:03 PM PST - 113 comments

Three second bursts of previously lost Technicolor

The British Film Institute has recently discovered short, evocative snippets of lost early Technicolor films from the Twenties (including a brief, tantalizing glimpse of Louise Brooks from the lost film The American Venus). [more inside]
posted by orthicon halo at 11:51 AM PST - 13 comments

Gelman's Law

A quick rule of thumb is that when someone seems to be acting like a jerk, an economist will defend the behavior as being the essence of morality, but when someone seems to be doing something nice, an economist will raise the bar and argue that he’s not being nice at all. [more inside]
posted by mondo dentro at 11:31 AM PST - 30 comments

For Your Consideration

Television Writer (Parks and Recreation, The Good Place), Guinness Book of World Records Contender* and national treasure Megan Amram is attempting to earn 1/4 of an EGOT with her web series, An Emmy For Megan. (Amram previously on Metafilter.) [more inside]
posted by bondcliff at 10:44 AM PST - 18 comments

War is old, so is sex. Let's play God, you go next.

Dirty Computer - an Emotion Picture, by Janelle Monáe [more inside]
posted by mrjohnmuller at 10:22 AM PST - 53 comments

Rick Dickinson, designer of the first three Sinclair computers, dies.

Few machines have changed the world of computing as much as these. I am old enough to buy two of these three gems after they were released, after millions of square kilometers of mowed lawns and petamiles of cycling through the neighbourhood, delivering unwanted advertising materials. The BASIC used on these machines was so easy to use that even an untalented 13 year old could program away in a jiffy, and there were beautiful to boot. What a talent.
posted by fordiebianco at 9:22 AM PST - 40 comments

"What they came back with made me cry."

Six months ago, a parks official cleaning out an office came across two cardboard boxes that had been sitting around for decades. Inside were 2,924 color slides, pictures made in parks across New York City’s five boroughs late in the summer of 1978. No one had looked at them for 40 years.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 8:29 AM PST - 48 comments

The worthy-but-dull obituary of Gustav Born

Tom Whipple's Twitter thread about receiving the assignment to write an obituary of Gustav Born for the Times of London (paywall). Turns out Born was inspired by being at Hiroshima after the bomb went off to research how platelets work. His father Max Born was a colleague and friend of Einstein. And he's the uncle of Olivia Newton-John.
posted by larrybob at 8:27 AM PST - 2 comments

... the great wolf Fenris rose from the deep

German chancellor Angela Merkel is set to meet with Trump today, as late night television analyses Trump's call-in to Fox & Friends (Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert) and Alexandra Petri evokes Ragnarök.
posted by nangar at 8:14 AM PST - 2281 comments

The quiet revolution: China’s millennial backlash

Behind a stall in Beijing’s central business district, a barista offers drinks with names such as “Can’t-Afford-To-Buy-A-House Iced Lemon Tea”. Another stall of the same chain sells “My Ex-Girlfriend’s Marrying Someone With Rich Parents Fruit Juice”. This is the brand Sang Tea (sang meaning “dejected, dispirited”) — a business that began in Shanghai last year, initially meant to be a temporary pop-up stall to mock the brand “Lucky Tea”, but whose dark comedy and deadpan presentation resounded with millennials, and prompted franchises to open across the country. [more inside]
posted by womb of things to be and tomb of things that were at 7:47 AM PST - 44 comments

Our Duty To Build The Future

“It is not that we are not capable of sustainable prosperity. We have never had more or better ability to build a better world. What we seem to lack is a belief that we can actually use those powers to change anything, and we lack that belief precisely because the future has been ripped out of our cultural debate...

.. Because the reality is that change is not only in the interests of future generations, it’s in our own interest. Almost all the things we need to do to safeguard the best possible set of choices for the children of 2050 are things we’d want to do for other reasons, anyway.” In 2010 Alex Steffen wrote Putting The Future Back In The Room, on the practical need for optimism in the face of Climate Change as a radical political act in beliving social and political change is possible.
posted by The Whelk at 7:19 AM PST - 16 comments

Women in Sonic Art

:::::::::::: Ekho :::::::::::: Women in Sonic Art A (defunct?) blog detailing female identified sonic artists, with links to their work.
posted by OmieWise at 6:50 AM PST - 5 comments

From blue to red

The Quest For The Next Billion-Dollar Color The world has never had a truly safe, stable and bright red pigment. The trail may start with YInMn, the first blue created in two centuries
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 5:04 AM PST - 31 comments

Image inpainting for irregular holes using partial convolutions.

Inpainting. Rese rchers fr m NVI A introd ce a deep lea ning me hod that ca edit imag s or recon ruct a corrup ed image that has holes or is mi ing pixels.
posted by adept256 at 1:14 AM PST - 20 comments

April 26

“I would want to get out, if I was in a fish tank and I was trapped.”

Alice Kassnove is a nine-year-old with a knack for captioning New Yorker cartoons. Her first cousin once removed, TV writer -and, conveniently, New Yorker contributer- Bess Kalb, did a Twitter thread about it. The magazine noticed, got in touch, and made a cute video: “A Nine-Year Old Girl Enters The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest”
Other comedians who have taken a crack at captioning on camera: Nick OffermanBill HaderAdam ScottAbbi Jacobson and Zach Woods
posted by Going To Maine at 10:11 PM PST - 25 comments

ITS LESBIAN VISIBILTY DAY!

IT IS LESBIAN VISIBILITY DAY! Read a goddamn book!
100 Best Lesbian Fiction & Memoir Books Of All Time from Autostraddle.
11 Books Every Queer Woman Should Read To See All Different Versions Of The Female-Identified Queer Experience from Bustle
100 Must-Read Bisexual And Lesbian Books from BookRiot
10 Best Lesbian Books from The Lesbian Review
15 Books Every Young Gay Woman Should Read from Buzzfeed Genre recommendations inside... [more inside]
posted by Grandysaur at 9:11 PM PST - 18 comments

I was told we would be fighting MEN!

Overwatch vs TF2 (SLYT)
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 8:10 PM PST - 36 comments

Outside-the-blocks thinking

Your Friday Browser Puzzle Game: Out of Bounds
posted by DoctorFedora at 7:36 PM PST - 18 comments

Mysterious Life and Death of Frank Meyer, the Lemon Man

Tiger-fighter. Monkey smuggler. If you've ever had a Meyer lemon, the sweet lemon variety beloved by celebrity chefs for its delicate and not-too-tart flavor, you can thank plant adventurer Frank N. Meyer. But supermarket shelves never have enough room for the mysterious story of how Meyer's lemons arrived in America, and the enigmatic and troubled man who cheated death on the other side of the world to find them.
posted by MovableBookLady at 7:26 PM PST - 10 comments

what can be achieved from that nothingness.

Architect Tadao Ando (born 13 September 1941) is highly regarded for his unparalleled work with concrete, sensitive treatment of natural light, and strong engagement with nature.
posted by spaceburglar at 7:18 PM PST - 9 comments

Wow, we can’t believe people are spending 36 hours in a casino

Extremist propaganda, dangerous hoaxes, videos of tasered rats—the company is having its worst year ever. Except financially: YouTube’s Plan to Clean Up the Mess That Made It Rich [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 5:45 PM PST - 32 comments

'Like a horror movie': my day in a Chinese cockroach factory

The Sydney Morning Herald's Kirsty Needham investigates: Xichang, China: It is like a scene from a horror movie. A door opens to a dark room, and in the beam of a torchlight, you see them. Hundreds of cockroaches, moving up the side of cupboards, and across the floor. It's about to get worse. Previously
posted by misterbee at 5:32 PM PST - 27 comments

"The totally not-gross snack you need in your mouth right now"

Dwight Garner, an accomplished New York Times book critic, can count himself a member of the rarefied club of journalists whose writing has actually moved hearts and minds on a topic of great importance. In one 2012 article, he changed my life, intimately and permanently, with an ode to an object I’d never previously considered with the solemnity it deserves: the peanut butter and pickle sandwich. [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 5:12 PM PST - 46 comments

“Frostpunk wants you to confront what you’re willing to sacrifice...”

Frostpunk is a game about suffering on an industrial scale [Polygon] “Frostpunk, the latest offering from 11 bit Studios (known for This War of Mine and the Anomaly series), is a colony simulation game with a twist. You’re not just building a city, say the developers. Instead, you’re forming a culture. 11 bit goes so far as to call its newest product the world’s first “society survival game,” and that may be laying it on a bit thick. In truth, it’s an amazingly well-realized, thematic narrative experience bolted on top of a skillfully crafted city simulation. [...] Frostpunk is just as dark as This War of Mine, but it manages to produce that same queasy feeling on an industrial scale.” [YouTube][Game Trailer] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 2:18 PM PST - 32 comments

21 Books You Don't Have To Read

GQ lists 21 books we are all supposed to read (if we want to be considered well read), and suggests we skip them for the alternatives they suggest. A sample: Mark Twain was a racist. Just read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He was a man of his time, so let's leave him there. We don't need him. If you want adventure, or misadventure, read The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, by Alvaro Mutis. It's one of my favorite books: sad, poetic, philosophical, and funny, with some of the best writing I've read.
posted by COD at 2:04 PM PST - 142 comments

"Our story begins with a small fish named Jimmy."

Ze Frank's True Facts comic nature series returns with the Frogfish. (See here for a webiste only about frogfishes.) Previously.
posted by Doktor Zed at 12:49 PM PST - 17 comments

the future is here

James Fallows travels the USA and says "Americans don’t realize how fast the country is moving toward becoming a better version of itself."
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:26 PM PST - 29 comments

First you take an eensy bit of white rum...

Taffy Bennington is a powerhouse of silly. Taffy Bennington is a singing, dancing, rollerblading, multi-wig-owning sensation whose songs about the founder of Bitcoin, mixed beverages, cats and Game of Thrones are sure to scintillate your senses and paralyze your funnybone with her medium-to-superb production values and her exhausting number of non sequiturs. One time she was even in a movie. I'm told she smells like flowers. She's on YouTube, Instagram and Twitter. If you're looking for a profile, here is a completely serious interview. [more inside]
posted by ostranenie at 11:25 AM PST - 4 comments

Bill Cosby found guilty of sexual assault

NYT: Bill Cosby Found Guilty of Sexual Assault After Years of Accusations [more inside]
posted by hanov3r at 11:10 AM PST - 109 comments

The female de-miners of Nagorno-Karabakh

Aftermath of a largely forgotten war (Aljazeera) The Nagorno-Karabakh War (1988-1994) took place between the former Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, over the landlocked mountainous region. Today, landmines and unexploded ordnance continue to contaminate the land, putting lives at risk and crippling the region's economy. Dedicated to clearing landmines across the world, The HALO Trust has been operating in Nagorno- Karabakh since 2000.
posted by lungtaworld at 11:02 AM PST - 2 comments

A Killing at Donkey Creek

Jimmy Smith-Kramer, a basketball legend on the Quinault Nation reservation, was 20 when he was mowed down by a white man in a pickup truck. The decision not to charge a hate crime, and recent talk of a plea deal, has re-opened ancient wounds.
The latest from the ProPublica project Documenting Hate. (previously).
posted by adamvasco at 10:46 AM PST - 4 comments

Trees are political too.

The poorer and less-white a neighborhood, the less likely it is to have robust tree coverage.
posted by ecourbanist at 10:30 AM PST - 18 comments

I woke up and felt a lump in my left breast.

What’s My Stage Again: It Was the Breast of Times, It Was the Worst of Times. Hi! My name’s Robin. I’m 28 years old, I live in Brooklyn, and I was recently diagnosed with cancer. I’d like to share my journey and experiences with you each week! [more inside]
posted by dancestoblue at 9:49 AM PST - 3 comments

Prehistoric footprints record battles between people and giant sloths

Over 10,000 years ago, weapons at White Sands were aimed at giant sloths -- Pleistocene tracks record humans stalking and confronting giant ground sloths. (Kiona N. Smith for Ars Technica) Records of footprints, or ghost fossils, reveal life and death story from the ice age (Kelly Carroll for National Park Service), according to recent research at the White Sands Trackways, which may represent the largest concentration of Pleistocene trackways in the United States, where most (but not all) tracks pre-date humans in the area, which is adjacent to the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. (Full research article from Science Advances) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 8:57 AM PST - 17 comments

Younger/older divide on social internet vs. social media

The way you value social media may have a lot to do with your age. "...Young progressives grew up in a time when platform monopolies like Facebook seemed inextricably intertwined into the fabric of the internet. To criticize social media, therefore, was to criticize the internet’s general ability to do useful things like connect people, spread information, and support activism and expression. The older progressives, however, remember the internet before the platform monopolies..."
posted by Miko at 8:44 AM PST - 50 comments

"Being a delivery worker is the lowest rung of work in society"

NYC's War On E-Bikes Takes Toll On Immigrant Delivery Workers [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 8:09 AM PST - 78 comments

"Come, then, be a Father and Mother to me."

The City Archaeologist of Boston has conducted a dig at the site of the Dorchester Industrial School for Girls, a benevolent institution founded in 1853, "a place where young, disadvantaged girls could be properly cared for, receive an education, and be trained to work as domestic servants." Together with the photographs of the items found there (including many spooky broken dolls of the "frozen Charlotte" type), the site offers biographies of some of the girls and young women who stayed in the Institute, using public records to piece together lives that were sometimes fortunate, sometimes invisible, and sometimes tragic. [more inside]
posted by Countess Elena at 6:28 AM PST - 9 comments

Just remember there's a lot of bad, and beware.

Cat Stevens (now Yusuf Islam), 1970, Tea For The Tillerman. Side A: Where Do The Children Play?, Hard Headed Woman, Wild World, Sad Lisa, Miles From Nowhere [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 6:15 AM PST - 46 comments

Trouble in the court of King John

"He Who Must Not Be Named": Can John Lasseter Ever Return to Disney? As the most powerful man in animation nears the end of a six-month "sabbatical" for personal "missteps," CEO Bob Iger must soon determine his fate. But a close look at the career and workplace behavior of the Pixar mogul reveals a man much darker, angrier and, at times, more abusive than "the happy-ass guy in the Hawaiian shirt," the purported Walt Disney of the digital age. [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:54 AM PST - 27 comments

Done right, casting is an invisible act

Nina Gold's role is an invisible one, and yet her taste has shaped much of what we watch, from The Crown to Game of Thrones. A Guardian long-read which touches on class, diversity and #metoo.
posted by threetwentytwo at 4:14 AM PST - 14 comments

Most video game loot boxes are now considered gambling in Belgium

The Belgian Gaming Commission has determined that randomized loot boxes in at least three games count as "games of chance," [Ars] [BGC] [BGC Google Translated] and publishers could therefore be subject to fines and prison sentences under the country's gaming legislation. [more inside]
posted by jaduncan at 3:04 AM PST - 66 comments

April 25

View from the surface of a comet

You may recall that a little over three years ago the Rosetta mission landed its Philae lander on the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. Two days ago Twitter user landru79 aligned and stacked long-exposure photographs taken by the lander to create a short stunning movie of the view from the surface of the comet. They followed up yesterday with an image-stabilized version. [more inside]
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 9:59 PM PST - 20 comments

Ask a Feminist: On Masculinity

"I have found in forty years of activism that the toxic/healthy dichotomy doesn't resonate for many men. I feel that when we come to them and talk about toxic masculinity, they very often think that we're telling them they're doing it wrong, that they're bad, and they have to change and give up their ideas of masculinity, the toxic ones, and embrace the new one. Basically we’re asking them to renounce Vin Diesel and embrace Ryan Gosling. And men won't go for it. They're too afraid to let go of things because you think they're unhealthy...So my job then shifted, not from scolding them to saying, “How can I support you living up to, not my definition of a good man, but yours?" Ask a Feminist: Michael Kimmel and Lisa Wade Discuss Toxic Masculinity (Signs, Summer 2018).
posted by MonkeyToes at 7:55 PM PST - 117 comments

Bowie Art Makes NY Subway Fun

The Broadway-Lafayette subway station has undergone a transformation. Posters, art, quotes: all by David Bowie in honor of the tribute show currently running have transformed the subway stop. And, the coolest thing is the set of Metro cards with different art on each one. Collect the set!
posted by MovableBookLady at 6:52 PM PST - 4 comments

Any Car You Want, as Long As It's a Truck

Ford announces it will stop selling all but two models of car in favor of SUVs and trucks: As part of a cost-cutting plan, the company announced today that it plans to stop selling all Ford brand sedans in North America with the exception of the Mustang and Focus Active. Ford sees 90 percent of its North America portfolio in trucks, utilities and commercial vehicles. Citing a reduction in consumer demand and product profitability, Ford is in turn not investing in the next generation of sedans. The Taurus is no more. [more inside]
posted by JoeZydeco at 6:38 PM PST - 124 comments

Universal Fan Con: Peeling Back the Layers

Universal Fan Con was meant to be a celebration of inclusivity and fandom. But as the show was unceremoniously canceled a week before it was expected to occur, fans are asking what happened. Many find themselves left out of pocket, having backed the Kickstarter and booked often non-refundable flights. We, Rosie Knight and Jazmine Joyner, have compiled a comprehensive investigation into Universal Fan Con and what went wrong. [more inside]
posted by rewil at 3:20 PM PST - 81 comments

Just stay in jail. It’s better.

Inside the Deadly World of Private Prisoner Transport "Every year, tens of thousands of fugitives and suspects — many of whom have not been convicted of a crime — are entrusted to a handful of small private companies that specialize in state and local extraditions. A Marshall Project review of thousands of court documents, federal records and local news articles and interviews with more than 50 current or former guards and executives reveals a pattern of prisoner abuse and neglect in an industry that operates with almost no oversight." [more inside]
posted by parallellines at 2:37 PM PST - 4 comments

No going Rouge

A hundred years after the First World War, the scars it left on the French (and Belgian) landscape are still so extensive that a huge part of the battlefields is inaccessible to this day: Zone Rouge. Each year some 900 tons of unexploded bombs are still dug up from the earth there and it may take up to 700 years to fully recover, as Paul Cooper explains in a Twitter thread.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:01 PM PST - 28 comments

My abortion wasn’t like Ben Folds said it would be

"Abortion does feel sad for some women, and that’s OK. But 'Brick' isn’t about the experience of some women, or even one woman. Pay no attention to the piano gimmick and all that remains of “Brick” is a man imagining a woman drowning both herself and those around her with the weightiness of her #FemaleProblems ..."
[more inside]
posted by lunasol at 12:53 PM PST - 80 comments

Seeking qualified alumni for zero-time (adjunct) status

Public universities in Illinois have faced severe financial issues stemming from state budget impasses. Now, Southern Illinois University has proposed a novel approach to staffing shortages: a “pilot project” in collaboration with the SIU Alumni Association to "create a pool of potential, volunteer adjuncts with advanced academic degrees who might contribute as needed for up to three years after their approval." Reaction has been, as expected, unfavorable (Twitter thread). [more inside]
posted by Existential Dread at 10:38 AM PST - 111 comments

“I think you got him, Michelle.”

Suspect Arrested in Golden State Killer Case, Authorities Say [The New York Times] “After decades, the authorities confirmed on Wednesday that they had made an arrest in the unsolved case of a serial killer and rapist who terrorized communities in California in the 1970s and 1980s. Joseph James DeAngelo, 72, was arrested and charged early Wednesday with two counts of murder, according to Sacramento County jail records. A person familiar with the matter confirmed that Mr. DeAngelo had been arrested in connection with the case. [...] An exhaustive investigation into the identity of the serial killer was documented in a book called “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,” written by Michelle McNamara, who died in April 2016. The book was completed after her death by a journalist and researcher recruited by her husband, the comedian Patton Oswalt, and published in February.” [WARNING: Discussion of Sexual Assault, Rape, Violence, Murder] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 10:33 AM PST - 167 comments

recetas tradicionales mexicanas

Bienvenidos a Abuela's Kitchen:
Lengua en mole
Pozole
Birria
Tamales: Preparations, Puerco, Chile Verde, Res
Enchiladas
Albondigas
Chilaquiles
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:28 AM PST - 15 comments

Stock buybacks, union power, and the anti-investment class

“Demands on firms intensified with the rise of ‘activist investors,’ formerly known as corporate raiders. As institutional investors became large shareholders of major corporations, they pressured firms to push up share prices by maximizing short-term profits. Since such institutional investors could move their investments around easily, firms grew more responsive to capital markets than to their customers. For public companies, key regulatory and legislative changes allowed for a greater focus on stock prices. In 1982, Congress passed the safe-harbor provision for buybacks, which formerly would have been considered market manipulation.” - How Shareholder Primacy Hurts Jobs and Wages (Law And Political Economy)
posted by The Whelk at 9:21 AM PST - 52 comments

Turkish baths: now with 100% more baby surprises!

Tia Freeman experiences some unexpected turbulence during her flight to Germany via Istanbul. Hold on folks, it's going to get a little baby bumpy. [more inside]
posted by drlith at 7:04 AM PST - 85 comments

Syria, You Are My Country

"In April 1928, approximately a year after the conclusion of the Great Syrian Revolt––ninety years ago this month––Tunisian Jewish superstar Habiba Messika [1903-1930] walked into the Berlin studio of the Baidaphon label and recorded, “Syria, you are my country” (“Souria Anti Biladi”). More about Messika's life, including her early death, and the pan-Arab anti-colonial effect of 78s."
posted by OmieWise at 6:49 AM PST - 4 comments

Every tear that you cry will be replaced when you die

British pop star Robbie Williams had his third album released in the bizarre format of 45rpm double vinyl. Regardless, Sing When You're Winning is a very strong album which charted high around the globe. Side A: Let Love Be Your Energy [animated video (possibly NSFW)], Better Man, Rock DJ [video]

Side B: Supreme [video], Kids Featuring Kylie Minogue [video link], If It's Hurting You [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 6:12 AM PST - 17 comments

April 24

Bullets and Ballot Boxes

On the evening of September 8, 1948, young Dorothy Nixon and her grandmother heard a car approach their home and heard two white men calling for her father. The white men had grown up near the Nixons and were well known to the family: Johnnie Johnson arrived with a shotgun, and his brother, Jim A. Johnson, carried a pistol. Jim called up to the Nixon’s house, demanding Isaiah Nixon come outside. When Nixon stepped onto the porch, Johnson asked Nixon how he voted that day...

Buried Truths is a podcast that grows out of an Emory University history class, deeply exploring a Civil Rights era murder that was never prosecuted, giving a window into the history of the voting rights movement, Georgia politics and much more. [more inside]
posted by latkes at 8:51 PM PST - 6 comments

Bob Dorough, December 12, 1923 – April 23, 2018

Bob Dorough has died, and with him an essential part of the early education of tens of millions of children in math, grammar, and United States civics. Here he is in 2011, doing an extended version of "Three is a Magic Number"... [more inside]
posted by ardgedee at 6:46 PM PST - 57 comments

(Cultural) Multilevel Selection

For the Good of the Species - "Whether group selection is an important evolutionary force, or not, is a highly controversial question in evolutionary science. A substantial proportion of evolutionary scientists still think that it is not." (via)
posted by kliuless at 5:55 PM PST - 18 comments

"Everyone thinks my dog is a puppy"

Writer Kelly Conaboy (previously) home-tested her dog's DNA so she could settle arguments at the dog park. [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:47 PM PST - 59 comments

Ours is a culture in which occupying a dwarf body makes you a target.

Eugene Grant on dwarfism. "I promise you: the best thing to call someone with dwarfism is *their name*. If you don't know their name, ask yourself why you need to refer to their body before knowing who they are." [more inside]
posted by bitmage at 4:16 PM PST - 14 comments

Cloudy With a Chance of Default

Drew Cloud Is a Well-Known Expert on Student Loans. One Problem: He’s Not Real.
After The Chronicle spent more than a week trying to verify Cloud’s existence, the company that owns The Student Loan Report confirmed that Cloud was fake. "Drew Cloud is a pseudonym that a diverse group of authors at Student Loan Report, LLC use to share experiences and information related to the challenges college students face with funding their education," wrote Nate Matherson, CEO of LendEDU.

Before that admission, however, Cloud had corresponded at length with many journalists, pitching them stories and offering email interviews, many of which were published. When The Chronicle attempted to contact him through the address last week, Cloud said he was traveling and had limited access to his account. He didn’t respond to additional inquiries.
posted by Atom Eyes at 3:29 PM PST - 13 comments

Can carbon farming save the planet?

"Climate change often evokes images of smokestacks, and for good reason: The single largest source of carbon emissions related to human activity is heat and power generation, which accounts for about one-quarter of the carbon we put into the atmosphere. Often overlooked, though, is how we use land, which contributes almost as much. The erosion and degradation of soil caused by plowing, intense grazing and clear-cutting has played a significant role in the atmospheric accumulation of heat-trapping gases." [more inside]
posted by Lycaste at 2:45 PM PST - 7 comments

Death and Dragons

Complex thoughts and emotions arise ... when contemplating death and immortality. The reflexive 'fight' against aging and death may have unforeseen consequences.
posted by CheapB at 2:25 PM PST - 42 comments

Why suffer a flawed family when you can hire a better one?

Japanese rental roles aren't new, but this New Yorker piece is the best take I've read on them.
posted by ecourbanist at 2:02 PM PST - 19 comments

Psychographic Snake Oil

The Big Data Panic. "Cambridge Analytica said it could move the minds of American voters. Science tells a different story."
posted by storybored at 1:13 PM PST - 25 comments

"... the sad truth is most of the time we call her Nutface."

The Evolution of Pet Names [single-link Bored Panda].
posted by chainsofreedom at 1:02 PM PST - 117 comments

Nicaragua protested

Nicaragua protested. People were killed. Changes to decrease pension benefits were rolled back. [more inside]
posted by aniola at 11:58 AM PST - 20 comments

The harp of Cronus

Play Saturn's Rings Like a Harp [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 9:01 AM PST - 8 comments

Regional reading: book picks for each U.S. state

This Map Shows The Most Famous Book Set In Every State (Business Insider; sorry-not sorry, Washington; previously) | The Literary United States: A Map of the Best Book for Every State (Brooklyn Magazine; both a map and a vision test) | The Most Popular Book in Each of the 50 States (Scribd, via Parade Magazine, in 2014) | 50 States, 50 Novels: A Literary Tour of the United States (Qwiklit belies its name and provides extra thought in their list) | 100 Books Across America: Fiction and Nonfiction for Every State in the Union (A Reading List for Your Last-Second Literary Road Trip from Lithub, who are good with words but bad with math, as they include a pick per state in fiction, non-fiction, and a famous title) | 50 State Booklist (National Education Association throws out limits and lists 329 titles in total)
posted by filthy light thief at 8:50 AM PST - 57 comments

"I'm sure you guys have noticed I'm a pretty private person."

"Lil" Miquela Sousa is a Spanish-Brazilian American model and musician from Downey, California who was recently featured in a V Magazine editorial spread. Her Instagram account, @lilmiquela, has more than a million followers. Miquela's selfies show her wearing designer clothes, posing with other models, musicians and activists -- and she even launched Prada's Instagram Gifs last fashion week. But there's just one catch: Lil Miquela is not a human being. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 7:44 AM PST - 90 comments

Giving the gift of life

There is something near-miraculous about the organ donation system, which allows tens of thousands of Americans a year to give up parts of their body they no longer need to extend lives There are about 660,000 people in the United Stated being treated for kidney failure. One donor's story.
posted by pjern at 6:26 AM PST - 17 comments

Where is Jessica Hyde?

The innovative Channel 4 conspiracy drama series Utopia, is to be remade by Amazon.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 6:22 AM PST - 26 comments

Defend Rojava

Officially branded as terrorists by the authoritarian regime of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, alternately supported, disregarded and threatened by the US in this era of incoherent strategic policy, the autonomous citizens of Rojava — or the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria — have been left to fend for themselves in the face of a brutal and largely indiscriminate onslaught by the Turkish military. Now a selection of prominent American academics and public intellectuals has launched the Emergency Committee for Rojava, with an urgent call to support and defend this unique experiment with popular control and self-management. [more inside]
posted by adamgreenfield at 5:19 AM PST - 5 comments

Not Quite Fanfic, or, The Fab(led) Four

It is a premise that could not possibly belong to anything good: years after their breakup, the members of a beloved band find themselves suddenly reunited, restored to youth and sent to undertake a quest in another world. Except that this is a completely serious epic fantasy novel (albeit with many moments of humor). Indeed, there's a lot of self-awareness - one of the advanced aliens responsible seems to have a bit of a thing for the Beatles. This is With Strings Attached, or, The Big Pink Job. The first half is available for free, as is the first chapter of the first volume of the sequel, The Keys Stand Alone, Book One: The Soft World. Backstory on the book's creation can be found at its TVTropes page. (Content warnings that I'm aware of: mentions (at minimum) of violence, mentions of sex, mentions of rape, drug use) [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 5:06 AM PST - 5 comments

Garlic bread? GAR-lic bread? GARLIC BREAD????

We Sent Garlic Bread to the Edge of Space, Then Ate It [SLYT] [5:23] [subtitles]
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 3:32 AM PST - 15 comments

Love is a good thing

Sheryl Crow stares at you from the cover of her 1996 eponymous second album and dares you. It was a largely a personal project, writing and producing basically everything. Cassette Side A:Maybe Angels, A Change [video], Home [video], Sweet Rosalyn, If It Makes You Happy [video], Redemption Day [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 2:58 AM PST - 17 comments

April 23

"Yes, I’m the nitwit who talked up going into bear country"

"I have become too much a friend to rules; I have slept for too long in a soft bed; I have grown quite comfortably into the rites of a civilized life and as a result I think I have become something of a fucking infant... But in the very breath of my demand for the “authentic” wild, the un-guided tour, I’m cringing at how flaccid and disgracefully naive I probably sound—how much like one of Krakauer’s goons, the kind of person who will either gentrify the woods or get myself killed in them."
posted by perplexion at 11:10 PM PST - 79 comments

“make, play, and discover.”

Nintendo has turned cardboard into a joyful ode to creation [Polygon] “Nintendo’s Labo kits do things with cardboard and electronics that feel like practical magic, but the construction process is the equivalent of overcoming a half-dozen small mountains. Building Labo Toy-Cons isn’t stressful or scary so much as it’s mysterious. You’ll spend a decent amount of time putting pieces together while wondering what they’ll do exactly, or even if they’re going to work when completed. And then you get that moment of joy when it all clicks into place, both literally and figuratively, and you get to marvel at the cleverness of the design. You always know what the next step is, and you know what the finished product will look like, but the journey itself is often full of surprises.” [Previously.] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:29 PM PST - 21 comments

Take Your Heart

It's been over one year since the release of Persona 5 (PS3/4) which is the latest installment of Persona series by Atlus. The new setting takes place in modern day Tokyo and incorporates a much darker tone compared to the prior small-town life of Persona 4. [more inside]
posted by chrono_rabbit at 7:14 PM PST - 19 comments

I'm not crying; it's just raining, on my face

Maps Without New Zealand
posted by Sebmojo at 5:20 PM PST - 36 comments

Stunt Men Recreate Video Game Fighters

I'm not a gamer so I have no idea how well these guys do. But it's certainly very cleverly done, and well done, too. And the stunt guys seem to put their all into the depictions. I'm looking forward to the next episode.
posted by MovableBookLady at 4:10 PM PST - 26 comments

"blobs of flesh with tendrils and limbs randomly growing out"

Robbie Barrat, a recent high school graduate from West Virginia and AI enthusiast, used a type of artificial intelligence called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to scan thousands of nude paintings from WikiArt. Using two neural networks, a generator and a discriminator, the GAN essentially mimics distribution of data — from images and music to speech — to create its own versions. Barrat's experiment did not go well. [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 3:15 PM PST - 48 comments

Can Your Cat High Five?

Jackson Galaxy, of Animal Planet fame, Launched Cat Pawsitive to increase the adoptability of cats in their shelters. [more inside]
posted by ShakeyJake at 3:03 PM PST - 26 comments

Heavy

Intense Gravity of Super-Earths Could Trap Aliens on Their Home Planet
posted by Artw at 2:55 PM PST - 29 comments

Atomic Man

The cleanup of Hanford continues, and continues to be controversial. It's a good time to remember Harold McCluskey, perhaps. [more inside]
posted by OneSmartMonkey at 2:54 PM PST - 11 comments

Mr Sweet Face

On TV's Jane the Virgin, men cry, embrace empathy, and are open of heart. Why one writer wishes he’d been able to watch it as a kid. [more inside]
posted by threetwentytwo at 11:42 AM PST - 8 comments

The Crudest Era In Cocktail History

The 1980s--"precisely the nadir of bartending in the twentieth century". Brought to you by Peachtree Schnapps, “the liquor industry’s equivalent of Michael Jackson’s Thriller," and the Flavor Generation.
posted by Hypatia at 11:37 AM PST - 116 comments

"I'd like Emma Stone to play every role in the movie. We'll CGI her."

The Crazy Rich Asians movie trailer has dropped, and it's glorious. Crazy Rich Asians is a 2013 novel by Kevin Kwan that follows Rachel Chu, a Chinese American economics professor, to Singapore to attend a wedding with her boyfriend, Nick. She soon discovers that Nick is "the Prince William of Asia," that his family is crazy rich, and that half the women in Singapore are now out for her blood. The film will be the first major Hollywood release (besides the occasional period piece) to feature an all-Asian cast in 25 years, since 1993's The Joy Luck Club. [more inside]
posted by sunset in snow country at 11:30 AM PST - 95 comments

you absolute coat hanger

Turns out you can make nearly any object into a good insult if you put ‘you absolute’ in front of it.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:54 AM PST - 88 comments

the sioux chef

Chef Sean Sherman on creating an indigenous kitchen in the modern world., committed to revitalizing Native American Cuisine and in the process we are re-identifying North American Cuisine and reclaiming an important culinary culture long buried and often inaccessible. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:05 AM PST - 21 comments

It’s Coming Through A Crack In The Wall

“Rather than shy away from being called a socialist, a word conservatives have long wielded as a slur, candidates like Mr. Bynum are embracing the label. He is among dozens of D.S.A. members running in this fall’s midterms for offices across the country at nearly every level. In Hawaii, Kaniela Ing, a state representative, is running for Congress. Gayle McLaughlin, a former mayor of Richmond, Calif., is running to be the state’s lieutenant governor. In Tennessee, Dennis Prater, an adjunct professor at East Tennessee State University, is running to be a county commissioner.“ Yes, I’m running as a Socialist, why candidates are embracing the label (NYT) Congress is wealthy, the people are not - How to get more working-class candidates like Kerri Harris to run for office (The New Republic). One out of every five Americans has taken part in a rally, speech, or protest in the last two years. (The Nib)
posted by The Whelk at 7:55 AM PST - 87 comments

“Day after day, the women could hear the chain saws getting closer.”

61-year-old Theresa “Red” Terry has been camped in a tree for more than three weeks. [WP]. She is protesting of the clearing of trees on her property for the construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline. Police are preventing friends and family from bringing her food or water.
posted by slipthought at 7:49 AM PST - 11 comments

GORDON'S ALIVE!!!

Richard Herring 'interviews' Brian Blessed (slyt, nsfw swearing, discussions of the sexual antics of gorillas and bellowing)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 5:44 AM PST - 21 comments

Fit doesn't have to be synonymous with thin.

Fit is a Feminist Issue, a blog about fitness for older women. [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 3:40 AM PST - 19 comments

What is the opposite of water?

Cygnus. Poetry by Cameron Barnett. Bivocal, dialogical, interruptive — what’s the technical term for this poem’s gracefully woven structure? It forces you to read between the lines. Maybe everything after the first line is an answer to “the opposite of water.” Or maybe the indented sentence is a sort of swan song floating through the questions. “Cygnus” is Latin for “swan” and the name of a constellation. Any way you read it, the poem’s interrogative uncertainty shimmers like the mirrors of that dazzling final image. Selected by Terrance Hayes
posted by dancestoblue at 2:38 AM PST - 6 comments

April 22

The Truth about Tanks on the Western Front

To give you a general sense, in April of 1945 the Germans have about 90 tanks on all of the Western Front. All tanks, everything, Panthers, Panzer IV, Tigers. They had a handful of Tigers. They had about 400 other armored vehicles, assault guns, Stug III and things like that. So they had just short of 500 armored vehicles on the entire Western Front, from the North Sea all the way down to Bavaria and Southern Germany. At that point in time the United States had 11,000 tank and tank destroyers, to give you some sense of the disparity in forces. - - Popular historian Stephen Zaloga gives an interview discussing armored warfare in Western Europe during the Second World War for Tank and AFV News. [more inside]
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:57 PM PST - 70 comments

Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match

"We came ... to try to understand the forces of social disruption that have followed Facebook’s rapid expansion in the developing world" NYT's Amanda Taub and Max Fisher reports on how Facebook as a platform has galvanised sectarian violence. Some might not agree with the assessment, like Jesse Walker, but for scholars in the field like Zeynep Tufekci, this makes a coherent argument. Meanwhile on Twitter: The 'botmageddon' in Southeast Asia || A researcher at the Digital Forensic Research (DFR) Lab of the Washington-based Atlantic Council think tank said over 17,000 bots tweeted content related to the Malaysian election over the last week.
posted by cendawanita at 8:53 PM PST - 25 comments

Armenians on the verge of a regime overthrow

The President of Armenia, Serzh Sargsyan, changed the constitution so that Armenia went from a semi-presidential state to a parliamentary one. Then he made himself Prime Minister immediately after his last presidential term. Armenian citizens, led by Internet-savvy opposition leaders under a coalition called Yelk (Way Out), dominated by the Civil Contract Party, now number possibly more than 150,000 people (~5% of the population) in the streets and more engaging in acts of disobedience from their homes. [more inside]
posted by k8t at 8:47 PM PST - 27 comments

So Here's Your Future

The Thermals have officially disbanded. Every album put out by The Thermals was a haven for punks and partiers, parents and kids, and outcasts of all stripes. Their albums were stuffed to the edges with intellectual rumination, melodies packed around bass lines, and a newfound sense of a life lived. (analogue.io) After 15 years on the scene, Portland, Oregon indie rockers The Thermals are packing it in. (consequence of sound) The Portland trio called it quits this week, but for many, they leave behind a fiery legacy that can’t be put out. (flood magazine) [more inside]
posted by curious nu at 8:26 PM PST - 11 comments

“We have obviously failed.”

After watching the Larry Kramer documentary In Love And Anger, writer Eric Thurm found the most memorable moment to be an angry speech by author David Feinberg about the movement as a failure. (The speech starts at 11:09 of this old AIDS Community TV Video.) He has written a meditation on the man and his rage for The Outline. [more inside]
posted by Going To Maine at 8:06 PM PST - 2 comments

Just Like Pigses At Black Masses

Black Sabbath's War Pigs; Faith No More Pigs; Cake (No) War Pigs; DJBassedOut's Disposable Dubstep War-Piggery (via Metallica); OhLordsYeah Of The Rhymes' Black Riders. (Spoilers: Legolas will kick their asses) [more inside]
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 7:39 PM PST - 53 comments

The Unbeatable Magician and the Indomitable Prodigy

Japanese novelist Yoshiki Tanaka's sprawling 10-volume space opera, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, was published from 1982 through 1987. Additionally, 5 volumes of side stories were published from 1984 to 1989. While the novels only recently became available in English, the series became well-known outside of Japan through an anime adaptation that began in 1988 and did not conclude until 2000. The series has also been adapted to computer games, manga, and the stage. Most recently, a new anime adaptation, Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These, started airing in April, 2018. [more inside]
posted by needled at 7:04 PM PST - 18 comments

Like Choose Your Own Adventure, but with miniatures

In BoardGameGeek's 18 years of existence, cataloging and judging board games from all over the world, only seven games have occupied the #1 overall position. The newest is Cephalofair Games' Gloomhaven, a super-ambitious legacy game that plays like Dungeons and Dragons using cards instead of dice. It weighs more than 20 pounds, costs around $200, and comes with more than 100 branching adventures for the players to hack and slash their way through. Reaching BGG's #1 position is particularly amazing for a game that isn't actually on the market yet (not counting the the two Kickstarter campaigns). FiveThirtyEight's senior board games correspondent Oliver Roeder takes a look at why it may be hard for any game to break Gloomhaven's hold on the top spot.
posted by Etrigan at 7:01 PM PST - 43 comments

“He is the patron saint of annoyance.”

Actually, Adam Sandler Is a Genius [Vice] “A low-brow comedy ingénue who skyrocketed to blockbuster success with a string of formulaic family comedies, Sandler’s brand eventually turned self-cannibalistic, tedious, and infuriating—yet, remained profitable. In the shadow of the Happy Madison factory, however, is a Wonka-like figure whose abilities are misunderstood. To me, Sandler remains one of the most enigmatic performers of his generation: a man that can star in Punch Drunk Love and Mr. Deeds in the same year. It’s easy to hate the cynical dreck he’s put out, and his hacky performances therein.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:16 PM PST - 46 comments

Letting Mother Nature reclaim prime farmland

What happened when a British couple decided to let their farm go to the weeds
posted by clawsoon at 3:02 PM PST - 52 comments

Jamón Ibérico Southern Style

An organic farm in Georgia received Spanish hogs a few years ago and they should be ready to release next year. Will it really be as good as the fabulous Spanish ham? We'll see. Content warning: hog butchery
posted by MovableBookLady at 11:31 AM PST - 34 comments

Holiday with spies: come for the windsurfin, stay for the refugee rescue

A Sudanese desert resort operated by Mossad was used as a cover to rescue Ethiopian Jews stranded in refugee camps in the 1980s. (SL BBC)
posted by stillmoving at 11:12 AM PST - 8 comments

More Americans work in museums than work in coal

You already know who. It’s white people in general and white men in particular, and especially white Protestant men, some of whom are apparently dismayed to find out that there is going to be, as your mom might have put it, sharing. The history of this country has been written as their story, and the news sometimes still tells it this way—one of the battles of our time is about who the story is about, who matters and who decides.
Rebecca Solnit talks about the myth of the real America and whose stories are treated with respect and whose are not.
posted by MartinWisse at 10:33 AM PST - 21 comments

Too many men

Men outnumber women by 70 million in China and India. The consequences of having too many men, now coming of age, are far-reaching: Beyond an epidemic of loneliness, the imbalance distorts labor markets, drives up savings rates in China and drives down consumption, artificially inflates certain property values, and parallels increases in violent crime, trafficking or prostitution in a growing number of locations. [more inside]
posted by Lycaste at 10:02 AM PST - 53 comments

Photo sharing site passed around

Flickr is now owned by Ludicorp Yahoo! Altaba Oath SmugMug, "acquired" in a deal for undisclosed terms. About the purchase, SmugMug's CEO states, "It sounds silly for the CEO to not to totally know what he’s going to do, but..." The Learn More page announcing the change of hands does not explain anything but it does feature photos of a food fight and clowns.
posted by ardgedee at 7:22 AM PST - 75 comments

Without you it's not as much fun to pick up the pieces

In 1997, Trent Reznor put together a fever-dream of a soundtrack album for David Lynch's film Lost Highway. Over 20 years later, it still has the same power it had when first released. [If you can listen to this album as a single work rather than broken up, I recommend that.] Side A: I'm Deranged (Edit) (D. Bowie), Videodrones: Questions (T. Reznor), The Perfect Drug [video] (Nine Inch Nails), Red Bats With Teeth (A. Badalementi), Haunting & Heartbreaking (A. B.), Eye (The Smashing Pumpkins) [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 12:47 AM PST - 37 comments

“So we did some exhaustive Googling, as all research is done now...”

China on Film is a two-part documentary (1, 2) from Singapore's ChannelNewsAsia and Make Productions which uses surviving fragments of film to illustrate parts of the history and culture of China from the 1890s up to the end of the 1940s. Experts and scholars provide context and scenes are contrasted with contemporary views of the same locations. (content warning: sequences covering war and other conflicts depict injuries and death) [more inside]
posted by XMLicious at 12:31 AM PST - 4 comments

April 21

The Pope's Long Con

Preacher Danny Ray Johnson rode the Trump train to the Kentucky House of Representatives by posting racist anti-Obama memes on Facebook and posing as a 9-11 (and L.A. Riots) first responder. Investigative podcast The Pope's Long Con, from the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting and Louisville Public Media, methodically dismantles Johnson's long series of lies and abuses. A heroic journalistic effort and engaging listen that examines how a serial scammer was able to rise to power. [more inside]
posted by latkes at 8:49 PM PST - 19 comments

Enthusiasm is the mother of effort. Also treats. Mmmm, treats.

German photographer Christian Vieler is noted for his photos of dogs trying to catch treats. If still photos aren't good enough, this Buzzfeed YouTube playlist leads off with dogs mostly missing thrown treats. (It also includes a slow-motion video of dogs eating peanut butter. You're welcome.)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:48 PM PST - 2 comments

“I wanted to keep flipping and performing but not competing.”

How Cirque du Soleil Turns Gymnasts Into Artists
posted by Etrigan at 6:28 PM PST - 8 comments

7 Songs By Electric Light Orchestra That Contain The Word “Blue”

BlueBoy BlueMr. Blue SkyBluebirdBluebird Is DeadBirmingham BluesMidnight Blue.
posted by Fizz at 5:16 PM PST - 20 comments

On becoming the M’Lady Meme

Maybe you've seen it. In the years since it was filched from Jerry's profile and uploaded to Reddit, the picture has become a meme of uncommon endurance and ubiquity. It remains the first Google Image search result for both "m'lady" and "tips fedora”... Jerry Messing, former child actor for “Even Stevens” and “Freaks and Geeks” discusses his history in show business and in private life, and how he feels about his image being co-opted by the internet entire.
posted by Slap*Happy at 4:48 PM PST - 22 comments

"My Bright-Lights Misadventure with a Magician of Manhattan"

"She walked into my life in Gucci sandals and Céline glasses, and showed me a glamorous, frictionless world of hotel living and Le Coucou dinners and infrared saunas and Moroccan vacations. And then she made my $62,000 disappear." [Vanity Fair]
posted by Charity Garfein at 3:19 PM PST - 70 comments

The door

After rampant internet speculation may have affected the enjoyment of people watching the first season of HBO's Westworld the production team has released Westworld Season 2: A Primer so people do want explanation can have it, and people who don't can avoid it.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:03 PM PST - 12 comments

Can I drink this?

Is it OK to drink the water you left out overnight? [more inside]
posted by veggieboy at 12:04 PM PST - 122 comments

To Hug, or Not to Hug: That is the Question

Everybody seems to be hugging everybody these days: is this okay? Her specific point in this article is the hugging of strangers, especially those met on a blind date.
posted by MovableBookLady at 10:55 AM PST - 86 comments

#RedforEd

The Third Major Red-State Teachers Strike of 2018 Will Start Next Week (NYMag) As education struggles continue to spread across the US — from Arizona to Colorado to North Carolina — there is an urgent need to learn from the experiences of both Oklahoma and West Virginia. Jacobin’s Eric Blanc sat down with organizer and scholar Jane McAlevey to discuss some of the major strategic lessons of these recent strikes - A Strategy To Win
posted by The Whelk at 10:42 AM PST - 19 comments

"I mean, somebody’s gotta stick up for Pluto."

A Conversation With Country Legend John Prine, Your Favorite Songwriter’s Favorite Songwriter. "Egg & Daughter Nite, Lincoln Nebraska, 1967 (Crazy Bone)" is one of the new songs on "The Tree of Forgiveness," his first album of original material since 2005. There's also a short mini-documentary, John Prine: The Road to "The Tree of Forgiveness." [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 8:22 AM PST - 33 comments

A walk in the light green

Frankie was Frank Hunt. He had been badly wounded in the same incident that killed Hines, and in January 1983, Schumann went to visit Hunt at his home in Bega. “I knocked on the door, and I don’t think he was very impressed,” Schumann said. “I was this long haired, bearded, left-wing firebrand … but because I was a friend of Mick Storen’s, he let me in the house, and I played him the song, and he was knocked sideways too
In an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald, John Schumann tells the story behind his classic Vietnam War song.
posted by MartinWisse at 5:39 AM PST - 16 comments

April 20

He waka eke noa.

He aha te mea nui o te ao. He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.
posted by spaceburglar at 10:51 PM PST - 21 comments

Where are we going? Somewhere we belong.

I found [suddenly departed] Avicii's debut album True [this is the link that shows singers and musicians and such] delightfully revelatory and I don't think his influence worldwide on EDM can be overstated. His willingness to find the intersection between X and Y has fed dance music since 2013, and will long into the future. [Ed. Note: Plus, it's one hell of a fucking affirming group of songs, and there's nothing wrong with having someone sing to you about how the world can be right when all this bullshit is going on. Give it a listen through, and it's okay to discard it after that.] Side A: Wake Me Up [video], You Make Me [video], Hey Brother [video], Addicted To You [video], Dear Boy [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:58 PM PST - 10 comments

Accelerated evolution of super-cockroaches is "unlikely to happen"

The world’s largest cockroach farm is breeding 6 billion adult cockroaches a year and using artificial intelligence to manage a colony larger than the world’s human population – all for medicinal use. It is part of the production process for a “healing potion” consumed by millions of patients in China, according to the government.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:17 PM PST - 35 comments

What makes #9B51E0 purple?

Color: From Hexcodes to Eyeballs "Why do we perceive background-color: #9B51E0 as this particular purple? This is one of those questions where I thought I’d known the answer for a long time, but as I inspected my understanding, I realized there were pretty significant gaps. Through an exploration of electromagnetic radiation, optical biology, colorimetry, and display hardware, I hope to start filling in some of these gaps." [more inside]
posted by aneel at 7:22 PM PST - 17 comments

The psychedelic renaissance or enclosing mind expansion?

Will psychedelics go corporate like cannabis? - "As billionaires start to invest in psychedelics, some longtime researchers in the field worry they’ll just become another commodity." (via)
posted by kliuless at 5:16 PM PST - 37 comments

“From colorblindness to subtitles, the medium still has a way to go...”

How Games Can Better Accommodate Disabled Players [Waypoint] “Text size is so important, not just for people with less than 20/20 vision, but also anyone who doesn't have a huge TV, or isn't able to sit close to it. It's a classic example of something that is really tough to go back to and fix, but if you consider it early enough in development, it's free, it's just another design decision. Catering for colorblindness is a bit more complex, as it's a design job based on how a particular game mechanic works. But it's generally about just making sure you don't rely on color alone to communicate or differentiate. And if there's no alternative to color reliance, let people choose the colors that work best for them. Subtitles are used by so many people for so many reasons, from hearing loss to playing on public transport, from unpredictable audio mixes to hard-to-understand alien and robotic accents, to playing in a noisy room to when the baby is asleep, so you need the TV on mute.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 3:55 PM PST - 37 comments

McInnes, Molyneux, and 4chan

Investigating pathways to the alt-right is SPLC's exploration of the question, "what brings someone into the alt-right ecosystem?"
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 3:08 PM PST - 119 comments

CONSUME

Drunk Education, previously Drunk TED Talks presents a lecture by MeFi's own John Leavitt: The Only Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism [via mefi projects]
posted by Artw at 2:49 PM PST - 13 comments

SSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

How Dr. Harvey Karp revolutionized baby sleep and the empire that followed (SLNYT)
posted by stillmoving at 1:54 PM PST - 32 comments

I can't tell where the journey will end

RIP Tim Bergling, Swedish DJ and producer better known as Avicii. Levels. Wake Me Up. True Stories - trailer.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:04 PM PST - 45 comments

The Weedian Abides

On this auspicious date in 2018, Matt Pike and Al Cisneros have reunited alongside Neurosis drummer Jason Roeder to birth a new Sleep LP, The Sciences (album stream). The record was teased less than 24 hours in advance, unless you count a cryptic Morse code message issued last year. [more inside]
posted by Existential Dread at 11:33 AM PST - 25 comments

Art and Sexism

"While feminist art critics have for decades pointed out the shortcomings of the 'male gaze,' the post-#MeToo reckoning with the art world’s systemic sexism, its finger-on-the-scale preference for male genius, has given that critique a newly powerful force. And the question of the moment has become: Is it still an artistically justifiable pursuit for a man to paint a naked woman?" Images at the link show painted or sculpted nudity and may be nsfw. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 10:37 AM PST - 98 comments

Minimum Wage Should Be A Living Wage

“Raising the minimum wage does exactly what it should—it raises wages for the lowest-earning Americans, and it continues to benefit them for years after the increase takes effect. Additionally, it looks like raising the wages for the lowest-paid workers could create a cascading effect that generates raises for employees higher up the earning ladder.” a deep data study by the U.S Census Bureau just announced the long-lasting efficacy of raising the minimum wage - so why isn’t it being reported? (Medium - Civic Skunk) Link to report PDF.
posted by The Whelk at 10:20 AM PST - 54 comments

Floating Bog Menaces Crow Wing County

“They said there was this huge chunk of land floating towards them... And they were sitting there having coffee and it just kept coming. It destroyed their dock and boat lifts and they wanted to know what to do about it.” Randy Tesdahl of the American Legion (“I come right out and admit, I am not an engineer”) considers a plan involving tractors, logs, and some really long chains. Atlas Obscura now solicits your solutions for dealing with the sphagnum monstrosity.
posted by Hypatia at 10:19 AM PST - 14 comments

dry, the beloved country

I wrote to my friend Paul, who lives in an apartment in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, to see if I could stay with him in Cape Town. He agreed—but only if I understood what was going on. What was going on, he suggested, was not just a drought, but a kind of vast, unplanned, crazy—and fabulous—social experiment. “I hope you’ll be game to test your water-saving limits!” he wrote me. “Nothing leaves the flat except via the toilet these days. The sink and bath are plugged ... I can manage the washing machine on the lowest setting, and its output goes into a 25-liter container for additional flushing. It’s all a bit extreme perhaps,” he conceded.
Surprising, even beautiful things can happen when it feels as if the world is about to end. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:18 AM PST - 7 comments

"It doesn't work for me, I'm a failure as a pot smoker"

A Brief History Of Stoner Movies [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 9:02 AM PST - 36 comments

17. ORANGE. 18. 19. 20.

The debut album from Boards of Canada, Music Has The Right To Children, turns 20 today. [more inside]
posted by lmfsilva at 8:43 AM PST - 34 comments

The [REDACTED] Robe Leaves Broadway

Broadway is full of funny old traditions handed down over the decades, but one is about to be retired. The "Gypsy Robe" is handed down from musical to musical, honoring the members of the chorus. It wasn't named after the Sondheim-Styne-Laurents musical (in fact, it predates that show by nearly a decade), but after the idea that the robe "travels" from show to show, like the itinerant Romani people. Actors Equity, the union that sponsors the Robe, recently admitted that "the words we use have an impact beyond their intent, and we cannot appropriate someone else's identity without their voice attached to it." The tradition will continue, but the Robe will be renamed based on a vote by Equity members.
posted by Etrigan at 8:07 AM PST - 40 comments

When the Windrush blows

Last week's Commonwealth Games brought a warm glow to many viewers in the "Home Countries" of the UK, but for those with ties to the wider Commonwealth it was a reminder of the chill now surrounding them. This week, stories of elderly members of the Windrush generation (named for the ship that brought the first post-war West Indian migrants to Britain in 1948) being dismissed from their jobs, denied NHS care, refused reentry to Britain, and even deported to countries they hadn't visited since childhood, brought the consequences of former Home Secretary Theresa May's "hostile environment" for undocumented migrants into the full view of the British public and press, after years of warnings from lawyers, reporters, MPs and the people affected. [more inside]
posted by rory at 7:57 AM PST - 81 comments

"the River Tiber foaming with much blood"

On 20 April 1968, the Conservative MP Enoch Powell delivered one of the most divisive speeches ever made by a British politician, in which he argued that by permitting mass immigration, the country was "heaping up its own funeral pyre". The speech caused an outcry, but 'Enoch was right' has been a racist dog-whistle for far-right politicians ever since. Fifty years on, the BBC explores the legacy of the speech for the immigrant communities in Wolverhampton, Powell's old constituency: Living in Enoch's Shadow. (Warning: offensive language) [more inside]
posted by verstegan at 4:55 AM PST - 30 comments

Framed for Murder by His Own DNA

When the DNA results came back, even Lukis Anderson thought he might have committed the murder. Traditional police work would have never steered police to Anderson. But the DNA hit led them to seek other evidence confirming his guilt.
posted by mattamatic at 3:48 AM PST - 11 comments

April 19

Nothing Compares 2 Prince Rogers Nelson

The original "Nothing Compares 2 U", with accompanying tear-jerking video. [more inside]
posted by ashbury at 9:46 PM PST - 31 comments

Brand Korowai

Will Millard set out to spend a year with the Korowai tribe of West Papua, known as one of the most primitive in the world. Turns out they're on to him.
posted by divabat at 9:41 PM PST - 28 comments

Mentioning literary doubles gets you immunity

Russian Authors I Have Never Technically Lied About Yet Always Feel Uncomfortable Discussing: A Series Of Frenzied Internal Monologue -- The eternal, internal debate, waged at Daniel Mallory Ortberg's The Shatner Chatner. Ortberg previously, and previously, and previously and...
posted by Iris Gambol at 9:17 PM PST - 51 comments

Don't Be Afraid; It Will Get Easier

During the whole Nine Inch Nails era of Ghosts I-IV and The Slip and the tour associated with those releases and also Year Zero ("Lights In The Sky"), NIN live band keyboard performer Alessandro Cortini's side project modwheelmood released three EPs, which together with one more track were combined into 2009's Pearls To Pigs [~55m total]. You've probably never heard of it, but give it a listen. [Ed. Note: What if Savage Garden had an edge?] Side A: Problem Me [which on the album leads into], MHz, Forli', [which on the album leads into] Bellevue Ave [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:06 PM PST - 8 comments

"Please Natasha I am sorry the sculpture offended you."

Is This An Ad? is an occasional column by Buzzfeed's Katie Notopoulos (previously) "in which we take a celebrity’s social media post about a brand or product and find out if they’re getting paid to post about it or what." Her latest latest one asks "Is This Creepy Sculpture An Ad For Soylent?"
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 6:28 PM PST - 26 comments

How Janelle Monáe Found Her Voice

What led up to "Dirty Computer," her new album.
posted by MovableBookLady at 6:26 PM PST - 29 comments

During the 10 hours I was reporting on this story, I was groped 22 times

"This year’s Coachella experience was also full of moments I never saw on Instagram: being repeatedly violated by strangers. In the three days I was at Coachella, I only spent a total of 10 hours at the actual festival, where I watched numerous performances and interviewed festivalgoers about their experience with sexual assault and harassment for Teen Vogue. [...] Of the 54 young women who spoke to Teen Vogue for this piece during the weekend-long event, all of them had a story of sexual assault or harassment that occurred this year at Coachella."
posted by humuhumu at 3:18 PM PST - 136 comments

“DMG BOOOM”

Injecting Oscillators Into The CPU of A Gameboy [YouTube] “YouTuber LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER - who does loads of really interesting and experimental things with old tech - decided to put some of faulty Game Boy consoles through the grinder to see what he could come up with. He soldered a wire from an oscillator to the timing crystal of the Game Boy itself, allowing him to override the timing and use the oscillator to muck about with the Game Boy's CPU speed.” [via: Nintendo Life] [Previously.]
posted by Fizz at 1:35 PM PST - 9 comments

We might as well have taken the kitchen sink

Readers of the women's travel blog Her Packing List share their their "tipping point" stories of the moments that made them ditch the heavy suitcases. To help readers pare down, HPL has over one hundred packing lists, broken down by destination and purpose of travel, as well as special lists like what to pack for wheelchair travel (and bonus: service dog); how to pack a traveling kitchen; and ultralight packing (12L handbag for 3 weeks). Counterpoint: two essays in defense of overpacking by Amelia Diamond and Taffy Brodesser-Akner. [more inside]
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 1:22 PM PST - 74 comments

Fate/Grand Ripoff

Though Gudako is monstrous, she’s the players’ monster. She shares in their despair and elation, and she describes her relationship with the gacha as a hell from which she cannot escape. Most crucially, this creature of pure id is, like her customers, driven by an unstoppable thirst for rare anime girls.
Fate/Grand Order is a free to play gacha game where people can spent thousands of dollars to get limited edition jpegs and then mocks them for doing so with its player avatar character.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:08 PM PST - 35 comments

Welcome To The Next Level

Two Guys Making New Sega CD Jewel Cases Are In An Accidental War "The cases didn’t stay shut, for example—there was no “click” that held the front cover in place when it was closed. If you tried to insert the piece of protective foam that originally came inside a Sega CD or a Saturn case, plus a manual and a disc, all those contents wouldn’t quite fit inside the case without the front bulging out. The problem that everyone seemed to bring up was that the black inner tray that held the discs sat loosely in the clear outer tray, and if you turned the case over, the tray would likely fall out."
posted by Servo5678 at 11:54 AM PST - 23 comments

"Let's Everybody Keep Cool"

You've probably heard the infamous audio "Houston, we've had a problem" from the Apollo 13 mission and the ensuing communications from mission control to the spacecraft, but have you ever heard the stuff even the astronauts didn't hear? Eavesdrop on flight directors Gene Kranz, Glynn Lunney, and the rest of the gang in mission control as they try to work out the problem from the ground and what they can do to fix it without jeopardizing the lives of the crew. It doesn't cover launch to splash down, but a lot of the critical parts are there. Long, but well worth your time! (MLYT)
posted by Krazor at 11:36 AM PST - 12 comments

Palantir Knows Everything About You

Peter Thiel's secretive surveillance company, Palantir, has been linked recently to the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Bloomberg BusinessWeek explores how Palantir was used by a team at JPMorgan to spy on employees and senior execs, how much data they can access on ordinary citizens, and how that data is used, including use by LAPD to "...monitor and stop the pre-crime suspects as often as possible, using excuses such as jaywalking or fix-it tickets."
posted by Existential Dread at 11:18 AM PST - 32 comments

"We're a single engine, that's it."

All the cockpit transmissions from the Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 engine failure that prompted an emergency landing in Philadelphia on Tuesday, April 17, 2018.
posted by Shepherd at 10:53 AM PST - 67 comments

You're In A Restoration Hardware Dude

So you don't have to visit Reddit, a video of the top r/AntiMLM posts of all time showcasing various Facebook Multi-Level Marketing scams.
posted by The Whelk at 10:09 AM PST - 24 comments

Mass Consensual Hallucinations

‘One Has This Feeling of Having Contributed to Something That’s Gone Very Wrong’ - VR pioneer Jaron Lanier on internet politics. Meanwhile according to Laura Hudson If you want to know how we ended up in a cyber dystopia, read Ready Player One
posted by Artw at 9:42 AM PST - 51 comments

Bean Freaks

Fifteen years ago, when Sando founded Rancho Gordo, he had no food-retailing or farming experience. Now he’s the country’s largest retailer of heirloom beans and a minor celebrity in the culinary world. He’s a side dish who’s become a staple. "The Hunt for Mexico’s Heirloom Beans: Rare varieties discovered by Rancho Gordo’s Steve Sando have turned the humble legume into a gourmet food," by Burkhard Bilger.
posted by lazuli at 9:04 AM PST - 47 comments

#IWasWrong

He is the Warax, and he speaks for the troops. A retired U.S. Marine who started a joke account as a reaction to the idea that vets are a right-wing monolith, the Warax mostly drinks brake fluid and carps at the "mil-bro community", amassing thousands of followers on the left-leaning #natsec Twittersphere. But then he got serious, talking about how he had belittled and dismissed female Marines, ending with #IWasWrong. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 7:24 AM PST - 19 comments

Ceramic Treasures of Japan

Onta is a small village of potters in Japan, who produce distinctive etched ceramics entirely by hand (YT). An episode from Ceramic Treasures of Japan, an NHK World series of 15 minute documentaries, which looks at local ceramic arts in various parts of Japan. Episodes are scattered across youtube; links to 9 episodes are inside. [more inside]
posted by carter at 7:23 AM PST - 3 comments

recognition and equity

Feminist Architecture: From A(udre Lorde) to Z(aha) (via things magazine)
posted by everybody had matching towels at 7:05 AM PST - 1 comment

Heads I win, tails you loose

Fake it till you make it: meet the wolves of Instagram. The rise and fall of binary trading and it's associated affiliate marketing on social media in the UK (Plus bonus! It's replacement by cryptocurrency hype)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:52 AM PST - 17 comments

Against Marriage

Marriage is what happens when the state gets involved in endorsing and regulating personal relationships. It's a bad idea.
posted by Segundus at 12:27 AM PST - 100 comments

April 18

Judge me, Alexa!

I’m not sure if this technology-derived algorithmic facticity of taste is better or worse than Meryl Streep-Anna Wintour deciding what I wear, which might be the core concern of this essay. The algorithm suggests that we trust it, but we don’t entirely want to. We crave a more “authentic,” lasting form of meaning...We know the machine doesn’t care about us, nor does it have a cultivated taste of its own; it only wants us to engage with something it calculates we might like. This is boring. “I wonder if, at the core of fashion, the reason we find it fascinating is that we know there’s a human at the end of it.”
posted by Grandysaur at 6:41 PM PST - 40 comments

Nancy

Olivia Jaimes is the first female artist for venerable comic strip Nancy in 85 years. She's been drawing strips for over a week now, and the early results are good. [more inside]
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 4:56 PM PST - 91 comments

…and besides, the pig likes it.

What could be cuter than piglets doing stuff? How about piglets getting a bath? [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:50 PM PST - 8 comments

Robots can save marriages

Robots successfully assemble an IKEA chair in under 9 minutes. There is additional information and video at IEEE Spectrum, including two attempts from 2013.
posted by AFABulous at 4:05 PM PST - 38 comments

“He doesn’t look like Superman without the shorts!”

'Action Comics' #1000 Is a Historic Superman Comic That Will Make You Cry [Inverse] “At 80 years young, Superman has never looked better. In the landmark 1,000th issue of DC’s Action Comics, available now, a murderer’s row of comic book writers have gathered for an anthology that celebrates the Man of Steel’s place in popular culture. And if you have a beating heart, it will also make you cry over a fictional character famous for wearing red underwear.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 1:24 PM PST - 44 comments

1.4 million without power on Puerto Rico

An island-wide blackout hit Puerto Rico on Wednesday, nearly seven months after Hurricane Maria. It's the second major outage in less than a week, with the previous one affecting some 840,000 customers. "This is too much," said Luis Oscar Rivera, a 42-year-old computer technician who just got normal power back at his house less than two months ago. "It's like the first day of Maria all over again."
posted by marteki at 12:43 PM PST - 21 comments

All Tomorrows Blokk Parties

Kodály Method - Keleti Blokk - All tomorrows parties In Budapest there's an incubator/hive/tower (use words what you will) of artists and musos called Keleti Blokk. The linked video was made there by The Kodály Method (not to be confused with the method of musical pedagogy that inspired the name).
posted by Buntix at 12:13 PM PST - 3 comments

Truth, whose mother is history

A handsome youth with shoulder-length golden hair sits in a London garret, pondering. He is composing his first book—a work he believes will transform him from a penniless foreigner into a literary cause celebré. But first he must answer a self-imposed question: what do Taiwanese aristocrats eat for breakfast? "George Psalmanazar," laudanum, constructed languages, human sacrifice, and an 18th-century hoax [more inside]
posted by theodolite at 12:04 PM PST - 9 comments

Anniversary of 1906 San Francisco Earthquake--what about next time?

On the anniversary of the April 18, 1906 devastating San Francisco Earthquake, long lost photos and footage have come to light providing new looks at the devastating aftermath. Meanwhile, according to the New York Times: San Francisco lives with the certainty that the Big One will come. But the city is also putting up taller and taller buildings clustered closer and closer together because of the state’s severe housing shortage. Now those competing pressures have prompted an anxious rethinking of building regulations. Experts are sending this message: The building code does not protect cities from earthquakes nearly as much as you might think. [more inside]
posted by MoonOrb at 10:35 AM PST - 37 comments

Decades Of Wage Stagnation Makes Freelance Writing Worse

“As any owner of a taxi medallion can tell you, reducing the value of a product or service can have serious repercussions — for the workers themselves and for the wider society they help comprise. When it comes to freelance writing, I fear that low prices have already begun to cost us. Talented writers walk away from the industry, plutocrats are free to pick stories and choose writers even when they don’t own the outlets, and the quality of the work declines. All of that looks to worsen over time.“ How Much Is a Word Worth? - Malcolm Harris - Medium Feature Story
posted by The Whelk at 9:33 AM PST - 61 comments

No one wants to walk into a mausoleum

Loud restaurants aren’t just irksome — they’re a public health threat, especially for the people who work at or regularly patronize them. Being exposed to noise levels above 70 to 80 decibels — which many restaurants subject you to these days — causes hearing loss over time. Why restaurants became so loud — and how to fight back
posted by Cash4Lead at 8:25 AM PST - 134 comments

A husky puppy and a box of 1988 baseball cards

"This story starts with my dog taking a shit on the bathroom floor, and ends with me cleaning out a meth house. [TWITTER] Hold up, I need a beer." Along the way: a footprint in that poop, the car mysteriously parked outside, and a box of ashes. [ThreadReader (all in one) link here] [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 6:04 AM PST - 103 comments

We need you to be a little less

"If all young girls and women committed such treason, patriarchy would collapse." Reema Zaman on the truth behind the perfect photos taken when she was a model and actress and her life since. CW: abuse, rape.
posted by Athanassiel at 12:10 AM PST - 28 comments

April 17

And the plants and the animals eat each other

Insect farms gear up to feed soaring global protein demand - "Layers of squirming black soldier fly larvae fill large aluminum bins stacked 10-high in a warehouse outside of Vancouver. They are feeding on stale bread, rotting mangoes, overripe cantaloupe and squishy zucchini." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 10:59 PM PST - 77 comments

brain already has too much information

“Pick Up” (Official Music Video) by DJ Koze, with animation by Terlina Lie.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:28 PM PST - 2 comments

(they first learned to manipulate time to make this possible)

"But it [machine learning algorithms] doesn’t always work well. Sometimes the programmer will think the algorithm is doing really well, only to look closer and discover it’s solved an entirely different problem from the one the programmer intended. For example, I looked earlier at an image recognition algorithm that was supposed to recognize sheep but learned to recognize grass instead, and kept labeling empty green fields as containing sheep." - Janelle Shane [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:59 PM PST - 34 comments

Barbara Bush, Wife of 41st President and Mother of 43rd, Dies at 92

"There were rumors that she favored abortion rights, but she made it clear that she supported her husband and would not say whether she was comfortable with his anti-abortion stand. She was vocal, however, in championing causes of her choosing. Literacy was one, and so was civil rights; she had been an early supporter of the movement."
posted by spicytunaroll at 7:14 PM PST - 103 comments

O Moldy Night

Stupendous achievements in jello/aspic molds.
posted by MovableBookLady at 5:07 PM PST - 63 comments

Obama Says to Stay Woke, Bitches

Sitting before the Stars and Stripes, another flag pinned to his lapel, former president Barack Obama appears to be delivering an important message about fake news — but something seems slightly...off. As the video soon reveals, the man speaking is not the former commander-in-chief, but rather Oscar-winning filmmaker Jordan Peele with a warning for viewers about trusting material they encounter online. [more inside]
posted by yes I said yes I will Yes at 3:00 PM PST - 51 comments

1668: The Year of the Animal

Beast Mode - Colin Dickey reviews Peter Sahlins' book 1668: The Year of the Animal in France. Read an excerpt from the book on LitHub: How a History of Two Pet Chameleons Made a Case for the Animal Soul. And here are two interviews with the author: Five Minutes with Peter Sahlins and Dogs in 1668.
posted by sapagan at 2:24 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John

A Little More Love is a standout track from Juliana Hatfield's new album of Olivia Newton-John covers. I Honestly Love You and Please Mr. Please also kick ass. And I mean, Xanadu, geez. Come on. [more inside]
posted by chococat at 2:12 PM PST - 28 comments

try to comfort yourself by thinking, cows don’t know about him

Tricia Lockwood is here to answer- How do we write now. A new work in Tin House. [more inside]
posted by zenon at 1:53 PM PST - 9 comments

"Imagine a man of my stature being given away as a prize."

NPR newscaster Carl Kasell has died at the age of 84. Kasell made his name as the steady voice of Morning Edition, then had a remarkable second act as the hilarious judge, official scorekeeper and contest prize for Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! Listen to some of the outgoing answering machine messages he left as a prize for listeners at the obituary. Peter Sagal shares his thoughts.
posted by rednikki at 1:32 PM PST - 76 comments

"I felt devastated."

"You may have seen the video of Washington Capitals’ Brett Connolly trying to give a little girl a puck, only to be intercepted twice by a man standing behind her. We asked Keelan Moxley for her side of the story."
posted by everybody had matching towels at 1:09 PM PST - 97 comments

Lin felt disoriented. “All the Italians looked the same," she recalled.

The Chinese Workers Who Assemble Designer Bags in Tuscany There was a note of jealousy to the Pratans’ complaints, as well as a reluctant respect for people who had beaten them at their own game. Elizabeth Krause, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has written about the changes in Prato. She told me, “While I was there, people would say to me, ‘Eravamo noi i cinesi’ ”—“We were the Chinese.”
posted by bq at 12:33 PM PST - 5 comments

BBC SFX Library

BBC Sound Effects is a collection of over sixteen thousand sound effects that the British Broadcating Corporation has collected and made through the years. The archive is fully searchable, and you can listen to it all on the site or download them as wav-files. The breadth of the material is too extensive to give any kind of overview, but as examples you can listen to a beggar singing on Portobello Road, a conversation in a restaurant in France, lions roaring while crickets chirp and the sounds made when dialing a phone in China in the 1960s. [all example links are to wav-files]
posted by Kattullus at 12:23 PM PST - 20 comments

And what rough feast, its hour come round at last…

Last week, the internet lost its damn mind over Heinz "Mayochup," a combination of mayonnaise and ketchup that seemed like a cruel prank on those of us who've long debated the individual merits of each. […] For those who dreamed of such a product, the reality was crueler still: It was only available to consumers in the Middle East. Yes, the type of condiment one might find on tap at Guy Fieri's home bar remained just out of reach, so we did what we do best as Americans: We complained on Twitter. And it looks like we're getting our way.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:58 AM PST - 89 comments

Who tells the myth

Neil Gaiman and N.K. Jemisin in conversation, on comics writing, Sandman, queer characters, adaptations and representation. Bonus link: Neil Gaiman on canonicity, fan fiction and updating characters sexuality after the fact.
posted by Artw at 11:20 AM PST - 9 comments

“...when seemingly good intentions go wrong.”

Bully Hunters organizers shut down campaign after disastrous first stream [Polygon] “In just under 72 hours, the vigilante gaming group Bully Hunters went from an idealistic anti-harassment campaign to a prime example of what can happen when seemingly good intentions go wrong. Bully Hunters is an initiative produced by marketing agency FCB Chicago, composed of an all-female organization made up of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players trying to raise awareness of in-game harassment. The Bully Hunters website described the collective as a “vigilante hit squad of elite female gamers” who will enter CS:GO games when called upon, evaluate the situation and take out an offending player if the case is determined to be severe enough. A debut livestream, which reportedly featured pre-recorded, staged gameplay footage and specially branded SteelSeries headphones used for charity giveaways, aired Thursday night. Reporters and other industry members criticized the group’s harassment countermeasures before the livestream ever kicked off.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 10:47 AM PST - 49 comments

For Humans, By Humans

Let’s buy some parking lots, in-fill them with walkable neighborhoods, and make a profit - Andrew Alexander Price lays out a proposal to create dense, human scale neighborhoods by following traditional urban planning schemes. (PDF)
posted by The Whelk at 9:12 AM PST - 47 comments

Pitting Shaq Against His Mortal Enemy

To kick off a brand new series for sports dorks called, appropriately, Dorktown, SB Nation editor and fan favorite Jon Bois and friends ask a simple question - what would happen if Shaquille O'Neal missed every free throw? (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:10 AM PST - 18 comments

Escape the echo chamber

Why it's as hard to escape an echo chamber as it is to flee a cult
posted by slimepuppy at 8:16 AM PST - 40 comments

Conservation Dilemma

Decline In Hunters Threatens How U.S. Pays For Conservation
posted by backseatpilot at 6:06 AM PST - 83 comments

A trade war heats up in Canada

Three years ago, the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP) achieved a shocking victory in Alberta (previously). One year ago, the NDP won in British Columbia and formed a government with the support of the Greens. But now the two provinces, united by party, find themselves divided by the proposed Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 5:59 AM PST - 66 comments

the heart of dorkness

How to get rich quick in Silicon Valley Corey Pein took his half-baked startup idea to America’s hottest billionaire factory – and found a wasteland of techie hustlers and con men
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:52 AM PST - 69 comments

It's the color of your heartbeat

Featuring some of the most crisp production on any of their albums, the album that Rush released in 1984 (their 10th studio album) was personal and political, deeply influenced by the Cold War, with allegorical SF elements. Grace Under Pressure [YT playlist ~40m] Side A Distant Early Warning [video], Afterimage [video], Red Sector A, The Enemy Within (Part I Of "Fear") [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 3:08 AM PST - 22 comments

April 16

DAMN!

Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. wins the Pulitzer. Called “a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.” DAMN. is the first album to win that isn’t a jazz or classical album.
posted by Grandysaur at 10:03 PM PST - 41 comments

Court Adjourned

Actor and Magician Harry Anderson has passed away at his home at age 65. [more inside]
posted by subocoyne at 5:48 PM PST - 123 comments

“prison-style boot camp”

a barbed-wire backdrop, a mugshot mockup for new clients, and prison bars at the entrance to the workout room:
If many women are taught to clutch their keys and walk the other way if they encounter such a group [of men of color] on the way home at night, ConBody counts on the fact that in the safety of a boutique studio, these same women will pay to exercise with the people they’ve been socialized to fear.
posted by spamandkimchi at 5:09 PM PST - 7 comments

Two Blasts from the Past

Ancient Rome modeled. Angamuco lidar scanned. Angamuco
posted by MovableBookLady at 5:00 PM PST - 11 comments

The Cherry King of Brooklyn

The Maraschino Mogul’s Secret Life: First the red bees arrived; then the Brooklyn cherry factory’s dark secret came to light. This New Yorker story had so many unexpected twists that I had to stop every few paragraphs to search for more information on some tangentially related topic. I hope you enjoy it too. [more inside]
posted by TedW at 2:46 PM PST - 19 comments

The Police never record "Tea In the Sahara," for one thing

How would the Earth's biomes be different if it rotated in the opposite direction?
posted by Chrysostom at 12:28 PM PST - 42 comments

"I confess to you that that causes me pain and shame."

Pope Francis publicly apologized to victims of sexual abuse by clergy in Chile, months after defending the bishop accused of covering up the scandal. [CW: discussion of sexual abuse] [more inside]
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:26 PM PST - 30 comments

The Tripods

The Tripods was a dystopian Sci-Fi series written in 1967 which served as a template for many of the YA novels out today. Picked up by the BBC in the 1980s, a TV series was released and then brought to the states on PBS on Saturday Afternoons. (And now some of you are about to watch it on YouTube.) [more inside]
posted by Nanukthedog at 11:32 AM PST - 75 comments

#BoycottStarbucks

Starbucks Apologizes After Two Black Men Were Arrested For Not Ordering Anything [The New York Times] “Last Thursday, the two men asked to use the restroom in the coffee shop but an employee refused the request because they had not bought anything, officials said. They sat down, and they were eventually asked to leave. When they declined, an employee called the police. Some of what happened next was recorded in a video that has been viewed nearly 10 million times on Twitter and was described by Mr. Johnson as “very hard to watch.” Police officers surrounded the men and escorted one of them out of the Starbucks in handcuffs. The other soon followed.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:58 AM PST - 193 comments

E S O T E R I C

Peter Thiel's Apocalypse
For two decades, Thiel has been one of the most blood pressure–raising figures in Silicon Valley, provoking fury from his liberal opponents and caveat-dripping defenses from even his most loyal allies. Yet there’s something oddly elusive about him, something that goes beyond his identities as a semi-closeted gay man, a heterodox Christian, and an exceedingly flexible libertarian—something reflected in the mishmash of seemingly irreconcilable beliefs to which he subscribes. Trying to discern what drives Peter Thiel can be an exercise in extreme futility, especially when he declines interview requests, as he did for this story. Yet everywhere Thiel goes, he leaves behind clues.
[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:43 AM PST - 82 comments

Bananas, Crackers, and Nuts

"How did three, and only three, food-related terms become shorthand for mental illness [in English]? ... There are reasons, or at least guesses, for the winding path these three terms took. But their etymologies are not related, and show just how weird and broken and non-systematic language can be. To put it in another, definitely worse way: What if….it’s language itself….that is bananas, crackers, and/or nuts?"
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:11 AM PST - 48 comments

The 100 Pages

To assemble our list of 100, we assembled a brain trust of comics professionals, critics, historians, and journalists. Our criteria were as follows: A page had to have either changed the way creators approach making comics, or it had to expertly distill a change that had just begun. In some cases, there were multiple pages that could be used to represent a particular innovation; we’ve noted those instances. We didn’t necessarily pick the 100 best pages — there are many amazing specimens we didn’t include because they didn’t have a significant influence on the craft of comics. The 100 [American] Pages That Shaped Comics. (A few pages are NSFW)
posted by 1970s Antihero at 6:57 AM PST - 24 comments

Semper fi

RIP R Lee Ermey, marine and actor, most famous for playing Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:48 AM PST - 71 comments

Handmade heritage

The stories from Atharna's project to document and archive Middle Eastern crafts are now up on their website: portraits of artisans and skilled craftspeople, from Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, Egypt and the countries of the Gulf. via
posted by infini at 4:33 AM PST - 1 comment

When skunks duel, wind direction is everything.

Entitled Opinions is back, with Dr Andrew Hui, an Assistant Professor of Literature at Yale-NUS College. His second book, A Theory of the Aphorism (forthcoming, Princeton University Press, Fall 2018), is "a short book on the shortest genre of all: the short saying. It studies the ubiquitous yet under-explored form of the aphorism, one that pervades multiple traditions, from Heraclitus to Confucius, Buddhist sutras to Pascal, Nietzsche to Twitter."
posted by spaceburglar at 4:22 AM PST - 22 comments

Evaporate: Cartoon-Shaped Sequences of Images and Sounds

From a distance, Lenstar Productions' Evaporate certainly has the shape, and basic episode plots, of an ordinary cartoon. But look any closer and its true nature becomes clear - based on creator Jacob Lenard's dreams (the hallucinating-in-your-sleep kind, not the aspirations kind), only the outermost structures of the series make a lick of sense - everything those structures contain is Something Entirely Else. (All non-numbered videos in the playlist are also based on dreams, except for Acid Rain.)
posted by BiggerJ at 12:09 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

April 15

Yappy

Cross Pharrell Williams with happy dogs and you get "Yappy" (previously, which includes a cat). What makes dogs happy? These sounds (supposedly) and water for sure, but the best thing has to be mobility. And after all that running around, you can help them get their rest with a sleep song or an entire livestream dog relaxation channel. [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:09 PM PST - 4 comments

La Piscine

In the last few years of the twentieth century the Mayor of Lille in northern France had a quandary. The old swimming pool in the small town of Roubaix had been closed in 1985 due to safety problems.  So, why not simply knock the old building down? What was the problem? The swimming pool just happened to be a stunningly beautiful example of Art Deco architecture. Time for a peculiarly French solution.
The Swimming Pool that Turned into a Museum (RJ Evans, Kuriositas) [more inside]
posted by Start with Dessert at 8:35 PM PST - 22 comments

The YouTube you want

Minimalist YouTube
posted by unliteral at 7:59 PM PST - 13 comments

Comey Is Not Trump's Homey

On April 17, former FBI Director James Comey will publish his much-anticipated memoir, A Higher Loyalty. Kicking off his month-long, multi-state book tour, his first interview since Trump fired him a year ago will air Sunday night with George Stephanopoulos in a primetime special of 20/20 (ABC). The Trump White House, currently without a communications director or a counter-Comey media strategy (Politico), has outsourced the spin to the RNC (CNN), while Trump heads off to Mar-a-lago for a summit with Japanese PM Shinzo Abe (Palm Beach Post). Reviews of the book so far are favorable (New York Times, NPR), but not uncritical (Washington Post). [more inside]
posted by Doktor Zed at 7:00 PM PST - 2249 comments

a startling gesture, a toast to unsuicide

Now the fate of trees, and of the whole world forest, is squarely in our machine-amplified hands. A new interview with novelist Richard Powers touches on the uses of fiction, the importance of awe, the relationship between technology and nature, and the resistance to Trump, among others. (via)
posted by doctornemo at 4:39 PM PST - 11 comments

Blighted for Foxconn

In Wisconsin, neatly maintained homes and dream houses are being designated ‘blighted’ to make way for Foxconn (many previouslies). [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 3:29 PM PST - 37 comments

Neither crow nor rain nor heat nor...

Infamous Vancouver crow and Canada Post worker are 'super cool' pals: After a combative introduction, Canuck the crow had a change of heart and started palling around with Tyler McLeod. The mail carrier for Canada Post is glad the brazen bird is firmly on his side after his aggressive antics halted deliveries to three addresses last spring. McLeod's Instagram feed is here. Canuck the Crow previously and previouslier.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 12:17 PM PST - 12 comments

La Piscine: Wow! First of all, do not kiss my ass. You big perv'!

La Piscine or the Swimming Lesson. [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 11:39 AM PST - 6 comments

April 14

Grow tender in the face of their fear.

How To Disobey Your Tiger Parents (SLNYT).
posted by storybored at 10:14 PM PST - 76 comments

they don't love you like I love you

Cameron Booth of transitmap.net (previously) is organizing the inaugural World Cup of Transit Maps (#wctransitmaps). The Round of 16 starts on Monday. London, Stockholm, New York, Chicago, Moscow, Vienna, São Paulo, Seoul, Berlin, Hong Kong, Beijing, Boston, Barcelona, Paris, Vancouver, and Santiago have made the cut. [more inside]
posted by invokeuse at 9:09 PM PST - 19 comments

Wonderful film from other places, times

I don't know who this Guy is but his channel is wonderful. I was first drawn in by New York in 1911 with glimpses of the elevated railway, Chinese American shopkeepers and an African American chauffeur driving a white family around. [more inside]
posted by Cuke at 8:58 PM PST - 27 comments

Rezball

"Rezball" is a "transition-based" style of basketball "that forces tempo with aggressive play, quick scoring (or at least shooting) and assertive defense that looks to force turnovers through pressing or half-court traps," and has been a feature of reservation life basically since the sport was invented. [more inside]
posted by Grandysaur at 8:42 PM PST - 17 comments

We're sorry about the Internet...

Following Mark Zuckerberg's two days of Congressional testimony, which included such gems as Sen. Ted Cruz making it clear that he believes the GOP is Facebook's victim, Rep. Joe Kennedy III making it clear he doesn't understand the difference between selling data to advertisers vs. allowing advertisers to target users based on on data, and Rep. Billy Long juuuust making sure that Facemash wasn't still up and running, New York Magazine has published An Apology for the Internet. [more inside]
posted by jferg at 6:29 PM PST - 32 comments

America's Neglected Middle Child

"The generation that is quickly occupying the majority of business leadership roles is one that's grown up playing video games, spends the most time shopping online, and uses social media more habitually than any other generation. If you were thinking it's millennials, that's probably because they've dominated the media's focus for the past decade. But it's actually Generation X." [more inside]
posted by darkstar at 5:58 PM PST - 154 comments

Art Bell, mysterious narrator of the American nightscape, is dead at 72

"At Mr. Bell’s peak in the 1990s, his show, “Coast to Coast AM,” was on more than 400 radio stations. He took calls all night long, alone in the studio he built on his isolated homestead in Pahrump, in the Nevada desert. He punched up the callers himself, unscreened, keeping one line just for those who wanted to talk about what really happened at Area 51, the U.S. government reserve that for decades has been a locus of UFO sightings and purported encounters with alien beings." --Marc Fisher, The Washington Post
posted by valkane at 5:27 PM PST - 56 comments

A Digital Bestiary

Dogowls are the cutest and the Sharktopotamus is the most fearsome, and in between are many other magical hybrids. (h/t madamjujujive NO WAIT THE PUGILLA IS THE CUTEST)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 5:21 PM PST - 11 comments

Sharky, survivor

Sharky wins The Stranger's First Annual Ugly Pet Contest Sharky shows me every day that it is okay to be a little weird, to never stop trying, and to not let the evil of the world make you bitter.
posted by k8t at 4:36 PM PST - 16 comments

Scenes along the trail of the Green Chapel

It started with a mysterious marking on a map & led to a 'thin place', where slender divisions separate heaven and earth, past and present. A remarkable journey that took place over the course of an afternoon & ended up hundreds of years in the past.
posted by scalefree at 3:48 PM PST - 14 comments

Grandma & Grandpa Never Stopped Being Into Threesomes

Georges Delfau was a 20th C. French painter who painted older folk having sex. Lots of it. (XXX, NSFW)
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 3:32 PM PST - 26 comments

“It's still not clear, however, why Mario's pictured with a carrot...”

This History of Super Mario Bros 2 Might Surprise You Inspired by the Japanese version of Carnival, Yume Kojo '87. [Motherboard] “Ever play Super Mario Bros 2 and realize how trippy that game is? Ever wonder why? It turns out that Doki Doki Panic was easier than the original Super Mario Bros 2, and basically fit the requirements for marketing to America. It was also horizontally based, unlike the failed prototypes of Super Mario Bros 2. So in essence, the Super Mario Bros 2 that eventually reached American gamers was a reiteration of Doki Doki Panic, only the four mascots were replaced with characters that were already familiar to Americans. Imajin became Mario, Mama became Luigi, Lina became Princess Peach, and Papa became Toad. The Doki Doki Panic-turned-Super Mario Bros 2 also introduced some new elements to the game, such as the ability to pick up your enemies and throw them, or the shells on the ground, that originally were meant to represent masks from the Yume Kojo carnival.” [YouTube][Super Mario Bros 2 Commercial] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 3:31 PM PST - 11 comments

Prints of the 1911 Chinese Revolution

Very rare block prints, some of which are news and some general content.
posted by MovableBookLady at 1:43 PM PST - 5 comments

RIP Miloš Forman (1932-2018)

Miloš Forman, Oscar-Winning Director of ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’ dies at 86 (NYT). [more inside]
posted by sapagan at 11:21 AM PST - 34 comments

The prosthesis hypothesis

Archaeologists Find Ancient Knife-Hand Prosthesis On Medieval Warrior: Even more fascinating than the survival of this man in an era before antibiotics is the possibility he had a unique prosthesis. Micarelli and colleagues examined the ends of the man's forearm bones and found that "there may have been a biomechanical force placed on the stump," such as the pressure of the bones against a prosthesis. The paper: Survival to amputation in pre-antibiotic era: a case study from a Longobard necropolis (6th-8th centuries AD) (pdf) [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:30 AM PST - 35 comments

The incredible shrinking lake

Just over 200 kilometres north of the Chadian capital, N'Djamena, Lake Chad is one of the oldest lakes in Africa. However, since the early 1970s, the lake has lost 90 percent of its original surface area to unsustainable water management and climate change. The basin itself has shrunk from 25,000 square kilometres to 2,000 square kilometres. [more inside]
posted by Too-Ticky at 8:33 AM PST - 10 comments

Is a typewriter a musical instrument? Depends on how you play it

Old typewriters are noisy machines, but “one person’s noise is another person’s music,” as they say, and there have been people in the past who have taken the sounds of typewriters and made them part of musical compositions, including: Leroy Anderson, who wrote The Typewriter in 1950 (featuring a single typewriter, or many), which Liberace played on his TV show a time or two; Krzysztof Penderecki (previously) also composed pieces for the typewriter, as heard in his chaotic piece, Fluorescences; you can hear some typewriter percussion in The Lovin’ Spoonful's 1968 single “Money”; Dolly Parton was inspired by the sound her nails that sounded like a typewriter and used that in the theme to the movie 9 to 5; and then there's the Boston Typewriter Orchestra who really go all out.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:31 AM PST - 24 comments

Better than monopoly money

Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn are the artists and filmmakers who recently took over an old co-op bank on high street in Walthamstow in an ambitious project that is part art installation, part stunt, part charity drive and part education campaign designed to inform the public about the true nature of money and credit creation. The rebel bank with a cause.
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 7:23 AM PST - 3 comments

April 13

We're always reaching for that guiding star

Fame was an Alan Parker movie musical from 1980 which had a hit soundtrack album, even more so in the UK and Europe than in the US. The title song won the Oscar for Original Song. Side A: Fame, Out Here On My Own, Hot Lunch Jam, Dogs In The Yard

Side B: Red Light, Is It Okay If I Call You Mine?, Never Alone, Ralph And Monty (Dressing Room Piano), I Sing The Body Electric [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:04 PM PST - 40 comments

what is a 'Letter Stick'?

Prince Charles was met by a delegation of Yolŋu clan leaders (convened by Dennis Wanambi and Waka Mununggurr) and lead by the Member for Nhulunbuy in the NT Parliament, Yingiya Mark Guyula. His Royal Highness was presented with a ‘Letter Stick’.
posted by spaceburglar at 6:13 PM PST - 17 comments

"He should remain in prison for the rest of his life."

For years, the personal development and multi-level marketing company NXIVM was rumored to be a cult (previously) led by a man named Keith Raniere. Last year, after NYT broke a story on female NXIVM members being branded (previously), federal officials began investigating. Today, Raniere appeared in a NY court to face charges including sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit forced labor.
posted by rcraniac at 5:20 PM PST - 27 comments

Inside out, and I’m feeling upside down

William Wegman's Weimaraner works are well-known. Two of them were installed in a Washington, DC Metro station. They were outtakes from Chip and Batty Explore Space, a work commissioned by the now-defunct NASA art program, more examples of which can be found on NASA's Flickr.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:05 PM PST - 3 comments

"Dance Without a Net Upon the Wire..."

A wild rat raids a Bristol bird-feeder via a high-wire act upon a washing-line. (Video.)
posted by Morfil Ffyrnig at 12:59 PM PST - 18 comments

🐶🎥 😀

Dogs. Livefeed. Happy.
posted by Fizz at 12:41 PM PST - 15 comments

You've been cabbaged

James Acaster is a British Comedian with some strange takes on the world. His standup is a little odd. He's become a staple of British TV appearing on Mock the Week and 8 out of 10 Cats. And he is currently streaming a series of specials on Netflix called Repertoire. But, for half of 2014, he spent his time embattled in a Cabbage fight with an 8 year old that still follows him to today.
posted by Nanukthedog at 12:19 PM PST - 20 comments

What it is, how it works, and who is for and against it.

Teen Vogue gets down to brass tacks : So, what is capitalism?
posted by The Whelk at 11:39 AM PST - 78 comments

ground rents, direct democracy, and volunteers

Delaware's Odd, Beautiful, Contentious, Private Utopia.
Arden is an arts-and-crafts intentional community based on the ideas of Henry George and the land value tax (a tax on unearned income)
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:26 AM PST - 5 comments

Gorgeous thousand-year-old shirt up for auction

The pride of a member of the lost Sogdian Empire, this gorgeous samite shirt is decorated with "ducks wearing scarves and holding pearl necklaces in their beaks, encased in octagon motifs featuring hearts." Despite being from the 7th-9th century, it's still in excellent shape today. The auction takes place April 25th, and the shirt is expected to fetch 300,000-500,000 pounds. Nytimes article, Guardian article.
posted by Slinga at 10:29 AM PST - 38 comments

We have a pip!

The hatching of a red-tailed hawk in a nest in the Presidio was caught on camera. You can watch the livestream here.
posted by rtha at 9:47 AM PST - 11 comments

Did drinking give me breast cancer?

"The breast cancer risk from alcohol isn’t nearly as high as the lung cancer risk from smoking. But alcohol-related breast cancer kills more than twice as many American women as drunk drivers do."
posted by Lycaste at 9:43 AM PST - 54 comments

Dermatology as a whole is still seen as a luxury.

"Leviticus says a lot of things, most of which we blessedly don’t have to listen to anymore, if we ever did. But it’s a reminder that attention has always been paid to skin. According to Leviticus 13:3-4, if you had a zit, you were quarantined for a week, and if it was worse, you had to burn your clothes or were kicked out of the neighborhood. If you squint, you can maybe see how fear of infection and disease led to such practices. It’s not fair, but it’s there. Zits have been a sign of not just hormones or genetics, but moral turpitude." Jaya Saxena for Racked, The Classist Implications of ‘Bad Skin’
posted by everybody had matching towels at 9:31 AM PST - 32 comments

no longer possible to have friendly chat w/ NPCs while dragging a corpse

The Strange Log: "Documenting the strange poetry of changelogs and patch notes. All tweets are unedited and selected verbatim."
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:48 AM PST - 40 comments

April 12

Is Virgil’s Aeneid canon?

At this point, two questions arise. Why do studios keep doing prequels if fans hate them? And why do fans hate them so much in the first place? [more inside]
posted by chappell, ambrose at 8:08 PM PST - 56 comments

The Secret Language of Ships

Huge container ships and the marks on them that only tugboats see and use.
posted by MovableBookLady at 6:54 PM PST - 65 comments

Just wait until I port Fortnite onto Apple 2e

Take a look at computer latency through the ages.
posted by Literaryhero at 5:26 PM PST - 20 comments

Paul McCartney Rabbit Hole

Swedemason's amusing and elaborately constructed Paul McCartney dance track. Donk. [more inside]
posted by I'm always feeling, Blue at 4:54 PM PST - 14 comments

6000 for 6000

A Girl Scouts troop for homeless girls in New York City aims to sell 6,000 boxes of cookies by the end of this week
posted by artsandsci at 1:14 PM PST - 26 comments

Willful Ignorance

The podcast debate between Ezra Klein and Sam Harris finally happened. For context, check out the background on all this, previously. [more inside]
posted by wibari at 12:32 PM PST - 107 comments

If Dinosaur Train was a documentary, would we know?

What if dinosaurs had an advanced civilization? To be clear, they almost certainly didn't. But, if they did, would we know? The question is relevant to xenobiology, which aims to find traces of alien life, perhaps long after it is extinct. A new paper [pdf] suggests that synthetic molecules like plastic and potentially nuclear fallout, would be detectable in the geologic record, although it might be challenging to separate signals like climate change from other abrupt events. Others have argued that, over geologic times, even plastics will be gone. (except from the fascinating book A World Without Us) [prev.],
posted by blahblahblah at 12:18 PM PST - 42 comments

SMALL BRAIN: posting memes to metafilter

How American Chopper, And Other Preferential Memes, Took Over The Internet [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:18 AM PST - 85 comments

Green-haired, genital-breathing turtle added to endangered species list

With a green mohawk, fleshy growths under its chin, and gills in its gentials, the Mary river turtle is one of the most striking (and endangered) creatures on the planet. More on the punk turtle on the Edge endangered species list here.
posted by stillmoving at 10:23 AM PST - 6 comments

“African art as a discipline deserves better.”

Brooklyn Museum Defends Its Hiring of a White Curator of African Art [The New York Times] “A recent decision by the Brooklyn Museum to hire a white person as an African art consulting curator has prompted opposition on social media and from an anti-gentrification activist group that argues the selection perpetuated “ongoing legacies of oppression.” In response to a letter from the group that stated its concerns, Anne Pasternak, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, said in a statement on Friday that the museum “unequivocally” stood by its selection of Kristen Windmuller-Luna for the position.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:48 AM PST - 54 comments

"I know a thing or two about pseudo-academic nonsense."

In a guest post on Elizabeth Sandifer's Eruditorum Press, the Institute Of Gremlins 2 Studies discusses Gremlins 2, Laibach, satiric over-identification, and the ridiculous, Stephen Colbert-esque satire that must be Jordan Peterson.
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:49 AM PST - 14 comments

No more sexually charged games of baccarat with the Provost’s wife!

A skit by Jared Neumark and Dan Chamberlain “YOUR DAYS OF PRIVATE YACHTS ARE OVER.”
posted by The Whelk at 8:21 AM PST - 10 comments

Where some rescue dogs come from

Rescue groups are increasingly buying animals at auction A deep look at how rescue groups fundraise and then use those funds to buy animals at auction, fundamentally changing the nature of the business for breeders (slWaPo)
posted by k5.user at 8:19 AM PST - 81 comments

"Deaf people can do anything hearing people can do, except hear."

Thirty years ago, students at Gallaudet University protested the appointment of (yet another) non-Deaf President. The week-long protest led to the appointment of a Deaf President for the first time in the school's 124-year history and was cited as a "major contribution to the passage of the [Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990].” The fight for Deaf representation and awareness continues.
posted by Etrigan at 8:13 AM PST - 5 comments

Racism is okay on Reddit

Unlike some web communities, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has stated that racism is permitted on the platform.
posted by agregoli at 7:44 AM PST - 184 comments

The Weird, Wacky Wonderworld Of Communist-Era Hotels

A celebration of classic haunts where the spirits of the old regimes still often sleep. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 7:09 AM PST - 22 comments

Big Five and Internet Addictions

Research shows that people who score high on neuroticism, low on conscientiousness, and low on agreeableness are more likely to become addicted to social media, video games, instant messaging or other online stimuli. [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 7:06 AM PST - 16 comments

Wavecore.

Mix tape 1. Spouting out. Mix tape 2. Coast. Standing. Epic. Spirals. Testing. Huge.
posted by loquacious at 1:48 AM PST - 2 comments

April 11

Into the drug-industry pricing fryer

Which firms profit most from America's health-care system - "Surprisingly, the worst offenders are not pharmaceutical firms but an army of corporate health-care middlemen." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 11:11 PM PST - 29 comments

Not dead, just quiet: a belated and happy birthday to Tom Lehrer

Tom Lehrer is still not dead, but he doesn't mind if you think he is*. He's a rare bird, one who falls into a tiny category of celebrities who packed it in at the peak of their careers; as he points out, “There’s me, Garbo, Salinger, and Deanna Durbin.” With around 70 recorded songs to his name** (though he only recognizes or claims 37), the prodigy who entered Harvard at 15 released two studio albums and three live albums between 1953 and 1965, and after 109 concerts, he called it quits. Since then, he's been pretty quite and generally elusive (previously), taking just enough time to grant 2 Chainz permission to sample his work, while keeping it cheeky in his reply. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:12 PM PST - 46 comments

My name is Pup

My name is Pup [more inside]
posted by QuakerMel at 9:18 PM PST - 18 comments

"Save your money and don’t buy concessions"

When 20-year-old Jade Vendivel went [to see The Quiet Place] with her roommate on Monday, she told The Washington Post she thought they were just going to be watching “another scary movie.” Vendivel admitted she was wrong, describing a theater that went “dead silent” after the previews ended. “It got to the point where I could only put a piece of popcorn in my mouth every 10 minutes whenever the sound would get high enough,” said Vendivel, who lives in Los Angeles. “Even then, I would have to hold the popcorn in my mouth until it was soft enough to chew without making any noise.” (alternate link)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:18 PM PST - 41 comments

In You Mind You Have Capacities You Know

The Carpenters' 1977 release, Passage, was a bit of a departure from their earlier albums, including not using the classic logo on the cover.Side A: B'wana She No Home, All You Get From Love Is A Love Song, I Just Fall In Love Again, On The Balcony Of The Casa Rosada / Don't Cry For Me Argentina [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:18 PM PST - 12 comments

Take me for a walk in the morning dew, my honey

Morning Dew is a post-nuclear protest song, written in 1961 by Canadian Bonnie Dobson who was living in LA at the time (it was the first song she wrote). "I was at a girlfriend's house discussing nuclear destruction; everyone was very gloomy long before the Cuban Missile Crisis. We believed atomic annihilation was imminent." Dobson has stated that the initial inspiration for Morning Dew was the film On the Beach which is focused on the survivors of virtual global annihilation by nuclear holocaust. There has been some dispute over the song's authorship; the power of the song is evidenced by the vast number of covers over the years. [more inside]
posted by parki at 7:47 PM PST - 27 comments

A dog’s eyes remain achingly sad.

The dangerous currents were all underwater, but the surface was smooth. We were successful roommates and occasional lovers, but never precisely friends. In a curious way what we shared was neither passion nor affection but a certain aesthetic sensibility. I liked to cook elaborate dinners, and he liked to arrange flowers. We were popular hosts. He was supportive and kind after Nate died—for that, I have nothing but gratitude—but after the first terrible weeks when my heart broke and broke, after I fixed my face for going out in public again, after I went back to work, our home life returned to its old rhythms, and I felt, more than anything else, alone. A dog, at least, would liven things up. [more inside]
posted by chappell, ambrose at 7:16 PM PST - 6 comments

"Blue Velvet" and Faith

How "Blue Velvet" is a better expression of faith and grace than most Christian movies.
posted by MovableBookLady at 6:29 PM PST - 10 comments

Hockey in the desert

“It used to be that everybody wanted out,” Watkins says. “But the city has changed a lot in a 30-year time period, to where I don’t hear that now from people. I wanted this team because I wanted my daughters, who I’m raising here, to have something to be proud of.” He looks around the restaurant. It’s filled with businessmen and women from the surrounding office park, a normal set of buildings that you could easily mistake for Scottsdale or Houston if it weren’t for the huge pyramid, ferris wheel, and fake Eiffel Tower looming in the distance as you get onto the highway. “T-Mobile is this little part of the Strip that’s ours, that’s for locals,” Watkins says. “Every other part of the Strip is for them. It’s made for them and for tourism. That part is made for us.” The Golden Knights are for Las Vegas, and Las Vegas only
posted by everybody had matching towels at 2:11 PM PST - 54 comments

VT Gov. Scott signs sweeping gun legislation

Gov. Scott (R) signed three bills on the steps of the capitol in an outdoor ceremony attended by supporters and opponents of the bills. The governor had been opposed to gun control bills in the state until the arrest in Fair Haven two months ago when a massacre was averted. He spoke passionately about how important these bills were for the safety of the citizens of the state. [more inside]
posted by MtDewd at 1:24 PM PST - 37 comments

The untold story of how Van Morrison fled record-industry thugs

Astral Weeks is widely regarded as one of the best albums in the rock ’n’ roll canon. Martin Scorsese claims the first 15 minutes of Taxi Driver are based on it. Philip Seymour Hoffman quoted it in his Oscar acceptance speech. Elvis Costello called it “the most adventurous record made in the rock medium.” Legendary music critic Lester Bangs declared it the most significant record in his life, a “mystical document.” It is also an album that was planned, shaped, and rehearsed here, in and around Boston and Cambridge. This fact has been a sort of secret kept in plain view. [more inside]
posted by jenkinsEar at 10:50 AM PST - 37 comments

googie dingbats and bungalow YIMBYs

How Los Angeles Banned Some of its Most Popular Buildings [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:36 AM PST - 31 comments

Thicc boi

maybe this meme will die overnight and we can get back to tweeting about our chickens and crop rotations "Welcome all other museum social media accounts, welcome to our #masterclass on using a thicc boi to change your public image in a freak event which will be difficult to replicate but let's try anyway and oversaturate the meme market and make the public despair of us" The Museum of English Rural Life finds Twitter fame in the form of very round sheep.
posted by PussKillian at 10:34 AM PST - 19 comments

The Mystery of the Mummified Minneapolis Monkey

In the course of renovating the old Dayton's department store in downtown Minneapolis, workers have been uncovering many long lost objects in the building's crannies. Last week, however, they found something highly atypical in the building's air ducts...the remains of a monkey. [more inside]
posted by Esteemed Offendi at 10:14 AM PST - 41 comments

#NewsMatters: A decimated newsroom revolts

At the Denver Post, successive waves of layoffs have reduced a once-great news team from 250 to fewer than 100, with another 30 in the works. The paper is owned by Digital First Media, which is controlled by a secretive hedge fund called Alden Global Capital. On Sunday, the paper's editorial team launched an insurrection by publishing an editorial titled "As vultures circle, The Denver Post must be saved." Not only that, but the editorial, in full-page format, led off a 6-page section including 9 more anti-Alden opinion pieces. [more inside]
posted by beagle at 9:52 AM PST - 40 comments

“The reinforcement learning process involves making gradual progress—”

Virtual robots that teach themselves kung fu could revolutionize video games [MIT Technology Review] “In the not-so-distant future, characters might practice kung-fu kicks in a digital dojo before bringing their moves into the latest video game. AI researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of British Columbia have created virtual characters capable of imitating the way a person performs martial arts, parkour, and acrobatics, practicing moves relentlessly until they get them just right. The work could transform the way video games and movies are made. Instead of planning a character’s actions in excruciating detail, animators might feed real footage into a program and have their characters master them through practice. Such a character could be dropped into a scene and left to perform the actions.” [Example-Guided Deep Reinforcement Learning of Physics-Based Character Skills][YouTube]
posted by Fizz at 9:36 AM PST - 8 comments

Do you have to do it in front of my kids?

I have nothing against gays, but do you have to do it in front of my kids? [more inside]
posted by mudpuppie at 9:07 AM PST - 37 comments

You’re not ready.

Mitzi Shore, owner and founder of the prestigious Comedy Store in Los Angeles, standup career broker extraordinaire, and mother of Pauly Shore, passed away this morning aged 87.
posted by infinitewindow at 8:40 AM PST - 15 comments

basically a watercooler on a ship

Scuttlebutt is a a decent(ralised) secure gossip platform whose documentation is written not just as a how-to manual or an API reference but as a philosophical/political examination about what social media is good for and how the commons of that platform might be affected by the way the technology is designed. [more inside]
posted by eustacescrubb at 8:22 AM PST - 27 comments

What Is To Be Done?

As inequality soars to record highs at home and abroad, people increasingly demand solutions. The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein asked 12 people thier ideas for addressing the inequality crisis:

I. Massive expansion of local housing stock (Will Wilkinson, Niskanen Center); II. Universal access to child care, funded by a tax on capital (Heather Boushey, Washington Center for Equitable Growth); III. Ship the 1 percent to Venezuela (David Azerrad, Heritage Foundation); IV. A big boost to union rights, universal social wealth fund (Matt Bruenig, People's Policy Project); V. Create a trust for every American baby (Darrick Hamilton, the New School); VI. Pick up the antitrust stick and wield it (Marshall Steinbaum, Roosevelt Institute); VII. Dramatically expand Social Security (Valerie Wilson, Economic Policy Institute); VIII. Give every American a federal savings account (Ernie Tedeschi, former Treasury economist); IX. Rein in Wall Street, crack down on white-collar crime (Stephanie Kelton, Stony Brook University); X. A national infrastructure program, funded by the 1 percent (Robert Frank, Cornell University); XI. Get government out of the way, repeal rules and regulations (Grover Norquist, Americans for Tax Reform); XII. A federal tax credit for first-time home buyers (Signe-Mary McKernan, Urban Institute).
posted by The Whelk at 8:13 AM PST - 41 comments

Shohei Ohtani, The Bambino, and Bullet Joe

Shohei Ohtani has been tearing it up as both a pitcher and a hitter for the L.A. Angels this season, inviting comparisons to the most famous two-way player in baseball, Babe Ruth. But as Jay Jaffe notes, two-way players have a long history in the sport. This is especially true if you include the Negro Leagues, where some of the greatest players of all time plied their trade. Mike Duncan (previously) discusses some of the great two-way players from that era.
posted by Cash4Lead at 7:22 AM PST - 6 comments

beyond forest and thighs

Have you ever thought to yourself that hey, I really like the queer afrofuturist musical stylings of Janelle Monáe, but I wish it could be just a little bit more queer? Also, what's up with ehr and Tessa Thompson?

Well.
posted by MartinWisse at 6:36 AM PST - 40 comments

Fencing Reflex Connects Life and Death

The beginning of life and the beginning of death have such similarities. In Buddhism, we say the entering and leaving of a life is with great pain and with disruptions in the brain. In the beginning, we leave behind all memories of the past, in the end, we revisit the past before we move onward. This story is not a Buddhist one, but it reminds me of a Buddhist description in the science of what reflex and reaction in babies and those close to the end of life does suggest the entry and exit of life to be similar in brain.
posted by Yellow at 5:33 AM PST - 8 comments

M0000n

Tour of the Moon in 4K (slyt)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:15 AM PST - 6 comments

The best reason Twitter should be allowed to continue to exist...

What's the intersection between (1) sports fan (2) bird lover and (3) graphic designer? It's Michael Taylor's ‘Other Birds as the Orioles Logo’. Originally an April Fools joke, the Twitter account has gotten thousands of Followers and Likes for the Flamingo, Atlantic Puffin, Pteranodon and Egg. Baltimore media took note, as did SBNation in an interview where the artist considered another MLB mascot to do variations on... the San Diego Padres 'Swinging Friar'.
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:16 AM PST - 16 comments

April 10

“[Nostalgia trip] too often and the returns diminish rapidly.”

“You may be asking yourself: What kind of sociopath complains about ice cream sundaes? I am wondering about this, too. I just know that when I see one, I am almost never as excited as the servers seem to think I ought to be… But enough about the barren, echoing tundra that passes for my soul. Let’s talk about the future of New York restaurants.”
Pete Wells writes in The New York Times about how “The Ice Cream Sundae Must Be Stopped[!]”
posted by Going To Maine at 10:27 PM PST - 73 comments

Excuse my beauty!

Trans Navajo badass, Stephanie Yellowhair, has passed away at 41 (her obituary is the forth one down).
”Her refusal to back down, to be anything other than who she was, helped turn her into a defiant role model for many still trying to understand who they were and what it means to be different.”
She gained viral fame for her sass and relisience in the face of an asshole police officer in an episode of Cops, a video that is both a heartache and a joy to watch, for it's full of transphobia, but also gloriously quotable one-liners..
posted by Grandysaur at 8:14 PM PST - 39 comments

YouTube Face

Taken cumulatively, there’s a surreal, Lynchian quality to the images.
posted by So You're Saying These Are Pants? at 8:06 PM PST - 18 comments

"I look forward to your letter complaining about this quiz and article."

Lynne Murphy (previously), blogger and print author, has a new book, The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English. Amanda Holpuch reviews it for the Guardian and offers a brief quiz: These words came into English after 1776. Do you know whether they are American, British or neither?
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 6:02 PM PST - 36 comments

10 dead 1000 wounded

On Monday the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) warned that the use of live fire by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian protesters in the occupied Gaza Strip could “constitute crimes under the Rome Statute.
[more inside]
posted by adamvasco at 5:33 PM PST - 105 comments

A pretty neat milestone, you have to admit

Maile Pearl Bowlsbey, ninth-generation American, was born on April 9th. This fact, by itself, is not noteworthy; a baby is born in the US every eight seconds. But baby Maile is different in one very interesting way: her mother, Tammy Duckworth, is a United States Senator, the first ever to give birth while in office.
posted by kevinbelt at 2:43 PM PST - 21 comments

When the Way You Love Things Is “Too Much”

When even the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has something to say about the way you love things—describing “highly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus (e.g, strong attachment to or preoccupation with unusual objects, excessively circumscribed or perseverative interest)”—it’s not easy to figure out how you should handle your obsessions in polite conversation.
posted by ellieBOA at 9:55 AM PST - 77 comments

The tl;dr for the youtube generation: get your supercuts here!

No time to binge watch? Too busy to catch single episode? No problem! Just take in a compilation/montage/supercut/marathon video and be on your merry way! Not to be confused with the hair salon, thanks winterhill. Start with: Parks and Recreation: Ron Swanson's Best Moments (Supercut) [more inside]
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 9:16 AM PST - 28 comments

putting the "opera" in "space opera"

A Field Guide to The Musical Leitmotifs of Star Wars.
Frank Lehman has complied a Complete Catalogue of Star Wars Letimotifs[PDF] from Episodes I-VIII. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:03 AM PST - 10 comments

"The baby is coming. The baby is... the baby is out."

Seth Meyers and his wife Alexi Ashe welcome their second child into the world in dramatic fashion. (SLYT)
posted by lauranesson at 8:18 AM PST - 25 comments

The Case for A Populist Democratic Party

FIRST This report shows that a pivot toward the “center” is poison with the Democratic primary electorate, using historical data to show the increasing liberalism of Democratic voters on core progressive values. SECOND This report shows that marginal voters and nonvoters support key progressive policies and could form a durable base for the Democratic Party. FINALLY This report shows that many Democratic incumbents are failing their constituents by opposing progressive policies with broad-based support. Future Of The Party.
posted by The Whelk at 7:19 AM PST - 105 comments

ACP is the sort of totemic dish Southerners squelch instead of trumpet

"Only the americanos order it," he told me. "They devour it."
posted by PussKillian at 7:07 AM PST - 82 comments

Weird and Pissed Off

Field Notes on John Carpenter’s First Fifteen Years (Jeff Firmin, Bright Lights Film Journal).
posted by sapagan at 4:37 AM PST - 8 comments

Statham vs Shark

The Meg.... based on the novel about a giant prehistoric shark. The Statham loving Den of Geek having been waiting for this for a long long time.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:14 AM PST - 41 comments

April 9

“We are just in utter disbelief and shock at the loss...”

15 Dead in Canadian Bus Crash Involving Humboldt Broncos Junior Hockey Team [CBC.ca] “The death toll from the bus crash involving a Saskatchewan junior hockey team bus has risen to 15, a day after the tragedy impacting players, personnel and others with the Humboldt Broncos. The RCMP said the 15th person died Saturday after the crash involving the bus, which was carrying 29 people including the driver, and a semi-trailer. Another 14 people were injured — some critically — in the collision about 30 kilometres north of Tisdale, Sask. ” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:20 PM PST - 50 comments

The biggest Black Lives Matter page on Facebook is fake

"For at least a year, the biggest page on Facebook purporting to be part of the Black Lives Matter movement was a scam with ties to a middle-aged white man in Australia, a review of the page and associated accounts and websites conducted by CNN shows." (by Donie O'Sullivan)
posted by J.K. Seazer at 5:19 PM PST - 30 comments

"Australians call this a fish, when it's clearly a fish."

Jordan Watson, of How to Dad fame, explains the differences between Australia and New Zealand: Part 1, Part 2. (h/t Miss Cellania)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 5:02 PM PST - 27 comments

We learn from every natural disaster.

Puerto Ricans and ultrarich "Puertopians" are locked in a pitched struggle over how to remake the island. Naomi Klein.
posted by adamvasco at 4:39 PM PST - 6 comments

Homes 'Earn' Minimum Wage or More in Half the Nation's Largest Cities

From Zillow Research: Overall, owners of the median-valued home in 24 of the nation’s 50 largest cities earned more in equity per hour over the past year than their local minimum wage. But homeowners in a handful of U.S. cities made out a lot better than that – in some cases much, much better. [more inside]
posted by Existential Dread at 2:55 PM PST - 65 comments

When do you know you're old enough to die?

(The Guardian) When do you know you're old enough to die? [ Barbara] Ehrenreich – who holds a PhD in cellular immunology – casts a skeptical, sometimes witty, and scientifically rigorous eye over the beliefs we hold that we think will give us longevity. She targets the medical examinations, screenings and tests we’re subjected to in older age as well as the multibillion-dollar “wellness” industry, the cult of mindfulness and food fads. These all give us the illusion that we are in control of our bodies...“I’m sorry, I’m not going out of this life without butter on my bread. I’ve had so much grief from people about butter. The most important thing is that food tastes good enough to eat it. I like a glass of wine or a bloody mary, too.” [more inside]
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 2:24 PM PST - 65 comments

Stories of Almost Everyone (slyt)

Will Ferrell and Joel McHale visit the Hammer Museum. There is modern art. It is appreciated, and the piss is taken. A good time had by all.
posted by Guy Smiley at 1:10 PM PST - 27 comments

Light Shows in SF / Hippies & Guns

Bill Ham and his San Francisco light show was an immersive ocular experience for audiences and musicians alike. Without the light shows, San Francisco’s fabled music halls, where everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Eric Clapton held court, would have resembled just so many more run-down auditoriums and crumbling former ice rinks. And then it kept expanding and growing. There's lots of technical info about how he brought his light shows into being. [more inside]
posted by MovableBookLady at 12:30 PM PST - 6 comments

(The Problem With (The Problem With (The Problem With Apu)))

'The Simpsons' To 'The Problem With Apu': Drop Dead — NPR's (and MeFi's Own) Linda Holmes on the show's ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ at Hari Kondabolu's criticism. [more inside]
posted by tonycpsu at 12:24 PM PST - 113 comments

If I don't save the wee turtles, who will?

Afroz Shah and fellow volunteers have spent the last two years in the “world’s largest beach cleanup project”, and baby turtles are back.
posted by Hypatia at 11:41 AM PST - 6 comments

What makes this song great?

In his 'What Makes This Song Great' video series, musician and producer Rick Beato breaks down the musical structure and production techniques in popular songs. Working from the stems of each song, he discusses everything from Sting's Lydian mode bassline, to the use of Neumann mics to capture the intensity of Chris Cornell's vocals; from sidechain compression in an Ariana Grande song, to the use of a flat 6th to introduce a melancholy air in to the vocal melody of a Tool song. Beato's enthusiasm and breadth of knowledge are boundless, and whether or not you like the songs he analyzes, you're sure to learn something. [more inside]
posted by googly at 9:38 AM PST - 43 comments

Who's Afraid of Jan Levinson-Gould?

An oral history of the most excruciating episode of The Office (US): The Dinner Party.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:23 AM PST - 27 comments

The Philharmonic Turntable Orchestera plays Mendelssohn

The Philharmonic Turntable Orchestera plays Mendelssohn to celebrate the 67th anniversary of the Long Player. Maybe there'll be more classical pieces performed in the future.
posted by brokeaspoke at 9:07 AM PST - 6 comments

*krrrk krrk krrk click*

Conserve The Sound, an online museum for the sounds made by vanishing and endangered technology. [more inside]
posted by zamboni at 8:49 AM PST - 19 comments

Those shrooms will creep up on you

What if Mario moved like one of the Bloopers or Jellyfish? What if the entire Mushroom Kingdom was made of that same undulating flesh, quivering and pulsing unsettlingly beneath the flailing boot or diving face of a lurching, heaving plumber? What if you could play... Jelly Mario? (via RPS)
posted by FatherDagon at 7:59 AM PST - 18 comments

Better use your towels, hoopy froods

The research findings largely square with other data showing that hot-air dryers and jet dryers can launch and disperse germs from hands into the air and onto surfaces—essentially setting off a very dirty bathroom bomb. But the new study clearly demonstrates that the less powerful hot-air dryers can also bathe hands with germs already swirling in the wash room. Hot-air dryers suck in nasty bathroom bacteria and shoot them at your hands. [Ars Technica]
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 6:38 AM PST - 115 comments

The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma

Junot Diaz in The New Yorker I ran the way I’ve always run. Like death itself was chasing me. For a couple of days afterward I fretted; I worried that I’d given myself away. But then the old oblivion reflex took over. I pushed it all down. Buried it all. Like always.
posted by chaoticgood at 6:33 AM PST - 38 comments

The Dream Of Leisure

Who Stole The Four-Hour Workday? A four-hour workday could solve a lot of our problems. If everyone worked fewer hours, there would be more jobs for the unemployed to fill. The economy wouldn't be able to produce quite as much, which means it wouldn't be able to pollute as much. (Vice)
posted by The Whelk at 1:14 AM PST - 75 comments

April 8

Impossible lovers and trans-world love letters

I argue that if David Lewis’ modal realism is true, modal realists from different possible worlds can fall in love with each other. [more inside]
posted by Pyrogenesis at 10:56 PM PST - 18 comments

The sinking of the El Faro

The sinking of the El Faro. In the darkness before dawn on Thursday, October 1, 2015, an American merchant captain named Michael Davidson sailed a 790-foot U.S.-flagged cargo ship, El Faro, into the eye wall of a Category 3 hurricane on the exposed windward side of the Bahama Islands. This is the story of the El Faro, recovered in part from three miles beneath the waves that took her. The worst American maritime disaster in decades.
posted by Slap*Happy at 10:13 PM PST - 26 comments

DEAD MAN RISING

On the eve of his 26th ‘WrestleMania,’ we talked to friends, colleagues, and victims of the WWE’s longest-reigning superstar about the making of the amazing career and (after)life of THE UNDERTAKER [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:49 PM PST - 14 comments

“I like the dark. It's friendly.”

Cat People: Darkness Betrayed By Geoffrey O’Brien [Criterion] “The premise of Cat People can be simply put: a woman (Simone Simon as Irena Dubrovna, a Serbian artist in exile) is doomed by an ancestral Balkan curse to metamorphose into a panther if aroused by passion, and thus obliged to withhold herself from the man she loves (Kent Smith, as the self-proclaimed “good plain Americano” Oliver Reed). It has the irrational finality of a folktale, an irrationality the film embraces, even as the characters keep it at bay with sage comments about the influence of superstition and the lingering effects of childhood trauma. Cat People is not a movie about the psychological power of folktales; it is itself a folktale.” [YouTube][Trailer] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 8:55 PM PST - 16 comments

It's a regional expression

Maybe you were aware of the steamed hams scene from the Simpsons season 7, episode 21. Maybe it was brought to your attention. But did you know that it's been reinterpreted as an anime, as a GTA: San Andreas mission, as Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: The Return, Arrested Development and Blade Runner? [more inside]
posted by phack at 8:13 PM PST - 48 comments

Robot middleman eliminates disadvantages of coresidence

Fribo: A Robot for People Who Live Alone - This little robot listens to what goes on in your life and shares it with your friends. [YouTube]
posted by unliteral at 6:38 PM PST - 38 comments

A poor man goes to jail when he steals; a rich man becomes a minister

Lula has gone to Jail. An action described by the NYT as pushing Brazil's democracy into the Abyss.
Those he championed, and they were legion, mourn the end of an era. [more inside]
posted by adamvasco at 4:08 PM PST - 22 comments

5.6 on boardgamegeek

Trash-talking wizard Irving Finkel and affable science youtuber Tom Scott sit down to play the 4500-year-old Royal Game of Ur.
posted by theodolite at 1:19 PM PST - 28 comments

Dress It Up In Stolen Silver And Garbage

Sadly, Fair To Midland is not a band anymore. But before they broke up, they released 2011's Arrows & Anchors, a very melodic metal album which explores sonic textures with enigmatic lyrics. Side A: Heavens To Mugatroyd, Whiskey & Ritalin, Musical Chairs [video], Uh-Oh [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:56 AM PST - 6 comments

R.I.P. Soon-Tek Oh

Actor Soon-Tek Oh, a ubiquitous presence on television in the 70's and 80's (though he is probably best known to younger audiences as the voice of Mulan's father, Fa Zhou), has passed away at the age of 85. Perhaps his greatest legacy is how in 1965 he joined eight other Asian American actors (including Mako and James Hong) to found the East West Players, which is the largest producing organization of Asian American artistic work.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 5:02 AM PST - 31 comments

All this over $569

In 83 Million Eviction Records, a Sweeping and Intimate New Look at Housing in America - "A Princeton sociologist chronicled the human toll of eviction in one city in a 2016 book. A new project may reveal just how widespread the problem is." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 4:48 AM PST - 47 comments

I want a cabbage

Brian & Charles During the bleak winter of 2012, Brian Gittins was marooned in his remote cottage. Instead of wallowing in misery, he decided to build a robot. (slyt)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:22 AM PST - 8 comments

April 7

i love that saying, it applies to so many situations.

A Veteran Black Officer Teaches Police How Not To Kill People [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:46 PM PST - 51 comments

The extended mind surfs uncertainty with predictive processing

Where does the mind end and the world begin? Is the mind locked inside its skull, sealed in with skin, or does it expand outward, merging with things and places and other minds that it thinks with? What if there are objects outside—a pen and paper, a phone—that serve the same function as parts of the brain, enabling it to calculate or remember? You might say that those are obviously not part of the mind, because they aren’t in the head, but that would be to beg the question. So are they or aren’t they? [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:12 PM PST - 35 comments

murmuration

murmuration simulator (via B3ta) [more inside]
posted by scruss at 7:42 PM PST - 13 comments

Mechanical Mathematic Devices Reviewed and Explained!

Behold the Addiator! I know what you’re thinking. For all of the cool mechanical calculators and mathematic engines and adding machines in everyday use that existed before the microchip, folks just can’t choose between. There should be someone to review mechanical math devices, who’s snarky and sarcastic and enthusiastic about these machines, and can explain how they work so you can follow along. Well! Here we are! This is the YouTube channel, owned and operated by Chris Staecker, mathematician, educator and collector! It begins with Napier’s Bones, and winds up at the Instrument Traverse Nomogram!
posted by Slap*Happy at 7:10 PM PST - 15 comments

“Bungie misunderstood from the onset what it thought players wanted.”

The never-ending Destiny 2 controversy is a teachable moment for the game industry [The Verge] “But what if the game maker, at the highest possible level, misunderstands what players actually want, and doesn’t listen to or trust those players when they verbalize those demands? No amount of nimble iteration or cool new features can bridge a gap of trust. And that’s what Bungie appears to suffer from today, with a player base that almost refuses to believe the company has the best interests of the game at heart and wants accordingly to act in good faith. We don’t know how much money Destiny 2 is making, or how many people play it every day or month. Bungie won’t say, and it could be that the game is healthy and revenue is flowing in from its in-game Eververse store. But from even just a cursory community snapshot, players are unhappy and the game feels as if it’s on a path toward an unsalvageable state.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 4:48 PM PST - 51 comments

Hip-Hop is Our Vibranium

The music of "Black Panther"
posted by MovableBookLady at 4:12 PM PST - 4 comments

Growing up in the '80s under the German sky.

Children of 'The Cloud' and Major Tom. The German sky I knew was a shared sky—shared with the Communist East and the Western Allies, with radioactive clouds and acid rain, with Major Tom and Mathias Rust. It was also somewhere we encountered, right above our homes, something far less certain and far more exciting than the heavy exposed-concrete buildings on the ground. Even in K-Town, where only America loomed overhead, the sky contained multitudes: twinkling distant AWACS, protective Pershings, A-10s with their uranium-covered payload, rumbling Galaxies, Miles Davis flying in for his concerts, wounded soldiers airlifting in, burn victims airlifting out. Was it crazy to imagine Major Tom somewhere in between them?
posted by bitmage at 4:10 PM PST - 3 comments

What would happen if a nuclear bomb went off in your backyard?

Interactive, horrifying graphic from Outrider about the effect of a nuclear strike in your location.
posted by MoonOrb at 2:36 PM PST - 58 comments

Meta data science, curated

The Data Science Community Newsletter is a "weekly data science newsletter featuring data science news delivered with humor & snark plus an always popular Tweet of the Week." Curated by Laura Norén and Brad Strenger , there is a strong focus on how university, government, and industry data science and ethics (or perhaps the lack of ethics) affect our world. [more inside]
posted by cowcowgrasstree at 11:24 AM PST - 5 comments

Screw The Gigs, Form A Union

Meet the Straphanger Who Talked Back to Those Damn Fiverr Ads (Village Voice) Previously, one year ago: The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself To Death.
posted by The Whelk at 10:59 AM PST - 34 comments

Unruly Bodies

“When Medium approached me to curate a pop-up magazine, I knew exactly what I wanted to do — to create a space for writers I respect and admire to contribute to the ongoing conversation about unruly bodies and what it means to be human. I asked twenty-four talented writers to respond to the same prompt: what does it mean to live in an unruly body? Each writer interpreted this prompt in a unique way and offered up a small wonder. Over the next four weeks, I will be sharing those small wonders with you.“ Roxane Gay’s Unruly Bodies. [more inside]
posted by Grandysaur at 10:20 AM PST - 9 comments

So magical right?

The Crystal Capitalists aren’t just participating in some warped, consumer-focused version of hippiedom. They’re doing a thing outsiders, especially white ones, have long done in New Mexico: consuming too greedily, too obliviously, while imagining themselves to be in a new and untouched place, a sort of Manifest Destiny-lite with souvenirs.
posted by lazuli at 9:25 AM PST - 21 comments

Positive and negative politeness

Does politeness mean being warm and welcoming, or not imposing yourself? The well-mannered dictionary-makers at Oxford err on the side of tactful, considerate, thoughtful, discreet, diplomatic. Brown and Levinson created the modern theory of positive and negative politeness, which suggests that different cultures have very different ideas about what's polite. Jane H. Hill had the theory in mind when she discovered that she was not as warm, friendly, and outgoing as she had thought. Benjamin Bailey concluded that different conceptions of politeness between Korean-Americans and African-Americans helped shape the Los Angeles riots in 1992 (PDF). [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 8:22 AM PST - 66 comments

The architect is the natural enemy of the librarian

"Librarians and architects were already at odds in the late nineteenth century, when librarianship and architectural practice were being professionalized. (The American Library Association was founded in 1876, the American Institute for Architects in 1856.) Many librarians felt that architects ignored their needs and created buildings that emphasized grandeur over functionality. ... At a meeting of the ALA in 1881, Poole delivered a fiery speech against the “vacuity” of the new Peabody Institute Library in Baltimore. “The nave is empty and serves no purpose that contributes to the architectural effect,” he argued. “Is not this an expensive luxury?" [more inside]
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:46 AM PST - 51 comments

Accidental Normcore Dadaism

The internet oddballs who think the ‘Heathcliff’ comics are deep. The banal strangeness of second-most famous cat in comics, and it’s surprisingly hard to reach creator.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 7:38 AM PST - 31 comments

A voice to the hitherto voiceless (?)

"So rather than treat the new populism as a coherent ideology and program, it may be more helpful to think of it by analogy to medical science. Just as a fever in the human body is a signal that something is wrong in that body, so the varied and sometimes-contradictory populist fevers and passions in the trans-Atlantic body politic are signals that the democratic project, far from being perfected in the post-Cold War world, has in fact got some serious problems."
posted by spaceburglar at 3:30 AM PST - 35 comments

April 6

“You like long things, don’t you, Chi-Chan?”

A series of commercials for Sakeru Gum. (“Coverage” on The Verge and SBNation.)
posted by Going To Maine at 11:36 PM PST - 30 comments

I'm counting all the possibilities

My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts... is not the subject of this post. That was the first Eno/Byrne-Byrne/Eno collaboration, way back in 1981. David Byrne and Brian Eno collaborated a second time [YT album, ~48m], in 2008, with the MEA [Most Excellent Album] Everything That Happens Will Happen Today [shockingly extensive Wikipedia link]: Side A: Home, My Big Nurse, I Feel My Stuff, Everything That Happens, Life Is Long, The River [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 11:01 PM PST - 13 comments

Calling All Mountain Goats Fans

For the past few months, the podcast I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats has provided a fascinating glimpse into the mind of John Darnielle, who is both one of our greatest songwriters and, [some] would argue, one of our greatest writers. Every week on the podcast, Darnielle has been sitting down with Night Vale host and Mountain Goats superfan Joseph Fink. The podcast’s first season has centered on the classic 2002 album All Hail West Texas, the last and greatest document of Darnielle’s acoustic-guitar-and-boom-box lo-fi period. And now we get a tribute album out of it. (Link to free album stream.)
posted by Orlop at 9:42 PM PST - 35 comments

Ain't that cute?

To wash the taste of an egregious week from your brain's tongue, head on over to Awwpics.org. Highlights include "Hog Lobster", "Baby crow knows nothing", "Handful of Fluff", "Baby rabbit", "Proud Mom Presents Her Baby :)", "Handful", "Cat holder", "This purple octopus is adorable!", “Who’s a good boye?", "Little bat cuddling with a stuffed pink bear" and "This, I have no words, I have no words".
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:57 PM PST - 24 comments

Puffin sunglasses

A scientist in England has made an enlightening discovery about Atlantic puffins — under a UV light, their bills glow like a freshly cracked glow stick.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 1:05 PM PST - 55 comments

Twitter Finds A New Way To Piss Off Users

Developers of four Twitter clients are protesting upcoming changes to Twitter's API that could destroy third-party clients. These apps include Talon and Tweetings for Android, and Tweetbot and Twitteriffic for iOS and Mac, but it will affect anything that uses Twitter's Streaming API. [more inside]
posted by SansPoint at 12:46 PM PST - 50 comments

“...it may find a purpose eventually.”

Japanese Exoskeleton Suit Goes On Sale For Only $93,000. [Kotaku] “The suits are nine-feet tall and weigh 88 pounds. The highly expressively exoskeleton is completely analog and won’t make the wearer faster or stronger. Then what exactly does the suit do? Well, you can get it in, walk around, control its arms and move the fingers.” [Interview with makers Reyes Tatsuru Shiroku and Tomohiro Aka] [YouTube][Promotional Video]
posted by Fizz at 12:34 PM PST - 38 comments

Give 'till it hurts

In February, Nick Griffiths suffered severe frostbite while competing in the Yukon Arctic Ultra race (temperatures dropped as low as minus 40 degrees Celsius during the race, forcing many competitors to stop). On Wednesday of this week, he had to have his toes amputated. In order to secure backup toes, Dawson City's Downtown Hotel has offered to take delivery of the detached digits for use in its notorious sourtoe cocktail (previously, previously, and previously).
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 12:09 PM PST - 25 comments

Revisiting The Breakfast Club

Molly Ringwald looks back at the John Hughes Films she was a part of (Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles) and considers how they hold up in 2018.
posted by COD at 11:52 AM PST - 63 comments

The Rise of White Gangs

Dangerous, growing, underreported.
posted by MovableBookLady at 10:26 AM PST - 16 comments

Starman Saw Too Much

NOAA Explains the Restriction on SpaceX launch webcast: During the March 30 launch of 10 Iridium Next satellites on a SpaceX Falcon 9, SpaceX cut off the live video from the rocket’s second stage nine minutes after liftoff. The company cited “restrictions” imposed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for terminating the live feed. [more inside]
posted by JoeZydeco at 10:16 AM PST - 26 comments

“Debt is the lifeblood of private equity...”

“If you have seen the movie Goodfellas, you may recall the scene where the mob takes over a bar: they run up bills on the company’s credit, rob the place blind, and then, when they’ve gotten as much as they can, burn the place down and walk away. That is only a very slight exaggeration of the real business model of private equity. “ The Working Person’s Guide To The Industry That Might Kill Your Company. (Splinter) “Private equity is remaking the retail environment, causing even successful companies like Toys ‘R’ Us to go out of business. And they’re fundamentally remaking American commerce in the process, with Amazon, Target, Walmart, and Dollar General set to benefit. Meanwhile, private equity is more or less getting off scot-free.” The Real Retail Killer. (New Republic)
posted by The Whelk at 9:55 AM PST - 66 comments

"I avoid the trap of easy definition." Cecil Percival Taylor (1929–2018)

free jazz originated with the performances of Cecil Taylor at the Five Spot Cafe in 1957 and Ornette Coleman in 1959 and while it didn't end yesterday, it took a deep breath and sighed and hung its head in sorrow. A magnificent ten-minute taste of what is lost.
posted by cgc373 at 9:50 AM PST - 26 comments

Forging The Chain

How Fleetwood Mac Wrote "The Chain". By YouTube channel Polyphonic (previously on the blue). [more inside]
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:34 AM PST - 23 comments

We were queer, here.

Queer moments and lives are marked across the globe, like so many Kilroys, at Queering the Map. [more inside]
posted by wintersweet at 9:25 AM PST - 18 comments

Whisked Away

The Science of Cooking: Best Way to Use a Whisk. (SLYT 3 minutes)
posted by storybored at 8:53 AM PST - 39 comments

How many pints of lager did William and Kate’s wedding cost?

Have some questions about the upcoming royal wedding? The NYT Style section has you more than covered. The Royal Wedding: Frequently Asked Questions and Answers to Everything You Ever Wanted to Know — and Some Things You Didn’t
posted by everybody had matching towels at 8:51 AM PST - 40 comments

Street 'Lava

Streets, Sweets and Syria meet in the story of an elusive Vancouver vendor. The Mystery of the Baklava Man. [more inside]
posted by mannequito at 6:33 AM PST - 6 comments

The last Blockbuster in the lower 48

About three hours southeast of Portland, I found a piece of American history in this Central Oregon ski-and-beer town of around 90,000 people. [more inside]
posted by aka burlap at 5:13 AM PST - 60 comments

The Crafty Cockney Checks Out

RIP Eric Bristow five times world darts champion. Always supremely confident/arrogant and controversial, he dominated the sport in the 80s (including being one of the leading players involved in the darts split) until 'dartitis' laid him low and he was overtaken by his mentee Phil 'The Power' Taylor. Bristow died from heart attack whilst working hospitality at a darts championship. [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:57 AM PST - 13 comments

April 5

Three Full Hours of Stars and Wars

JEDI PARTY. THE FRIEND ZONE. REVENGE OF MIDDLE MANAGEMENT. LASER MOON AWAKENS. ATTACK OF THE PHANTOM PAST. And now, the creators' five year mission concludes in Auralnauts Star Wars Episode 6: THE LAST LASER MASTER. (previously) [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 11:52 PM PST - 25 comments

Is the knowledge gained worth the price of the pain?

Dan Fogelberg's shimmering fourth album, Nether Lands was the number 13 album of 1977. It mixes 70s rock with folk and even classical in a very strong way. [YT album, 46m] Recommend! Side A: Nether Lands, Once Upon A Time, Dancing Shoes, Lessons Learned, Loose Ends [it's worth reading the full YT video description for this one, trust me] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 10:42 PM PST - 17 comments

Nothing in 2018 can surprise me anymore...Oh.

Stan Lee's blood stolen and used to sign comics.
posted by Literaryhero at 10:10 PM PST - 19 comments

By women, for women.

Farewell to “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” A groundbreaking, powerful work for women young and old, the authors of “Our Bodies, Ourselves” have announced that they will no longer be updating their life-changing publication. (Boston Globe)
posted by Melismata at 8:08 PM PST - 17 comments

I must plant at least one Panterosa and one Golden Pow

A new neural net post from Janelle Shane! This time, tomato names. [more inside]
posted by Emmy Rae at 7:26 PM PST - 9 comments

Isao Takahata Dead at 82

Isao Takahata, legendary animation director and co-founder of Studio Ghibli, has died at age 82. [more inside]
posted by Sangermaine at 5:43 PM PST - 49 comments

"There are times when it’s very hard to accept it."

Is chronic pain something more people should accept? Amid the opioid crisis, the concept of “pain acceptance” is gaining credibility. [more inside]
posted by Kybard at 1:43 PM PST - 213 comments

SO

The (Descendants Of John D.) Rockefeller vs Exxon, The (Descendant) Of Standard Oil [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:43 PM PST - 5 comments

20 Mules and 20,000 Pounds of Borax

Have you ever seen "20 Mule Team Borax" and wondered about the origin of the name? Or are you curious about how exact reproductions of the wagons were constructed, and then pulled by the requisite mules, in the 2017 Washington D.C. 4th of July parade? [more inside]
posted by maxwelton at 12:29 PM PST - 16 comments

Grief into grace

The President Sang Amazing Grace (Joan Baez) [more inside]
posted by DigDoug at 10:51 AM PST - 15 comments

Bikes are for boys: Cycling while woman

Aviva Stephens writes on cycling while woman. Excerpt: While there are several aspects of bike commuting that are unwelcoming to women, I think the largest hurdle to get over is sweat. First, women don’t sweat…but we do, so confusing... While I have yet to change the minds and hearts of American society that will allow women to sweat out loud, I have discovered a few tricks that have helped me overcome this unrealistic sweat-less standard for my daily commute.
posted by splitpeasoup at 10:33 AM PST - 63 comments

When Terrorists Run City Hall

We unearthed thousands of internal documents that help explain how the Islamic State stayed in power so long. "One of the keys to their success was their diversified revenue stream. The group drew its income from so many strands of the economy that airstrikes alone were not enough to cripple it...More surprisingly, the documents provide further evidence that the tax revenue the Islamic State earned far outstripped income from oil sales. It was daily commerce and agriculture — not petroleum — that powered the economy of the caliphate." (Warning: descriptions of assault and murder, also just freaky) [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 10:24 AM PST - 17 comments

We Have Always Been at Trade War with China

China retaliated for US tariffs, slapping duties on soybeans, planes, and autos (Reuters), after Trump escalated his trade war on Tuesday by threatening to impose new tariffs on $50 billion in imported goods ranging from bakery ovens to ball bearings (Politico). With the US trade deficit rising to a near nine-and-a-half-year high and the jobs market tightening (Reuters) – and Trump-voting states hit hard by the new Chinese tariffs (CNBC) – China's state media assured the nation will win any trade war with the US (Reuters). White House trade adviser Peter Navarro now promises Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer will lead high-level discussions with Chinese officials to avert a trade war (Bloomberg). Today, China has just filed a complaint at the WTO over US tariffs (MarketWatch). Yesterday, Trump tweeted, "When you're already $500 Billion DOWN, you can't lose!" [more inside]
posted by Doktor Zed at 10:09 AM PST - 2291 comments

Sorry I’m a mammal.

“The good news is, we are all witches! The not as good news is, looking at the legacy medieval witches left, it feels mildly unnerving to think our own histories could read something more like ‘socially awkward freaks constantly touching their lower chins’.”
Shaina Joy Machlus on body hair and witchcraft.
posted by Grandysaur at 9:42 AM PST - 3 comments

The mancatcher may be a bit obvious though

The Medievalist asks the important questions: how many medieval weapons can you identify by name?
posted by MartinWisse at 8:15 AM PST - 100 comments

The sadistic prosecution of Noor Salman

Everyone Got The Pulse Massacre Story Completely Wrong "Not long after Omar Mateen opened fire inside a bustling gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, the media scrambled to understand his depraved actions... Over the past two weeks in Orlando, Mateen’s widow, Noor Salman, was tried for having allegedly helped him plan his attack. The popular understanding of the Pulse shooting as a carefully targeted massacre was on trial as well. And in acquitting Salman, 31, on Friday, a jury also delivered a verdict on the story we’d told ourselves about the killings: We’d gotten it wrong."
posted by MythMaker at 8:05 AM PST - 42 comments

It's time for an RSS revival

It's time for an RSS revival. Long before Facebook, Twitter and Instagram weaponized the newsfeed, we had a technology that let us aggregate the news without annoying, creepy algorithms. [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 8:04 AM PST - 106 comments

computational notebooks

The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete "This is, of course, the whole problem of scientific communication in a nutshell: Scientific results today are as often as not found with the help of computers. That’s because the ideas are complex, dynamic, hard to grab ahold of in your mind’s eye. And yet by far the most popular tool we have for communicating these results is the PDF—literally a simulation of a piece of paper. Maybe we can do better." [via]
posted by dhruva at 7:25 AM PST - 25 comments

Jimothy Lacoste

A typical reaction to a Jimothy video will go from 'this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen' to 'this is the best thing I've ever seen', usually within the course of one song. [...] "Drugs" is an anti-Xanax anthem, while "Future Bae" is about the joy of commitment. His new video "Subway System" was filmed across the London Underground, which holds a special place in Jimothy's heart. "I always liked trains when I was young," Jimothy says. "I've always rode the lines when I was young, up and down, to the middle of nowhere and all the way back. In the video I'm just having fun in my natural environment. I'm doing my thing, I'm being me." [more inside]
posted by smcg at 7:00 AM PST - 10 comments

Decolonise science

Decolonise science – time to end another imperial era. An article in the Conversation by Rohan Deb Roy.
posted by tavegyl at 6:42 AM PST - 16 comments

Reminds me of Ask vs. Guess culture all over again

When You Can and Cannot Say ‘No’ When Someone Asks to Switch Seats With You on an Airplane "This, in a nutshell, perfectly encapsulates the fraught social dynamics of making and fielding a request. A person asked to switch seats often feels obligated to say yes for fear of being rude, even when it means a more unpleasant flying experience. But making such a request can itself be construed as rude." [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:24 AM PST - 246 comments

April 4

Farts are simply gas that comes out of the end opposite the mouth

Last year PhD zoology student Dani Rabaiotti and Virginia Tech ecologist Nick Caruso created the Twitter hashtag #DoesItFart (previously). The resulting database informs the just-published book Does it Fart? A Definitive Field Guide to Animal Flatulence. Bonus: Everybody farts. But here are 9 surprising facts about flatulence you may not know. (h/t ChuraChura)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:01 PM PST - 42 comments

“...more games, more sales, more gamers.”

Steam Spy has put together an interesting collection of stats and figures on Steam’s 2017, showing everything from the biggest games to the fate of indie sales. [via: Kotaku] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:21 PM PST - 34 comments

You say then how come out of love, is all this cruelty arising?

It sort of started with 1985's song Don't You (Forget About Me), a stadium-sized surprise US hit for Scottish band Simple Minds. They decided on Jimmy Iovine's big sound and Robin Clark's powerful vocals for their follow-up album 1985's Once Upon A Time [full album ~40m], and delivered an album that I feel should be included in the Every Track Is Perfect Club. Side A: Once Upon A Time, All The Things She Said, Ghost Dancing, Alive And Kicking [video] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:09 PM PST - 19 comments

So there was a MYSTERY at the library today.

A wee old women came in and said "I've a question. Why does page 7 in all the books I take out have the 7 underlined in pen? It seems odd." "What?" I say, thinking she might be a bit off her rocker. She showed me, and they did. (twitter thread)
posted by curious nu at 8:12 PM PST - 69 comments

And you thought bridge and tunnel people were bad

Why several trainloads of New Yorkers' poop has been stranded for months in Alabama is the question on everyone's mind in the little town of Parrish. New York Magazine calls the train's contents "New York's shittiest export."
posted by GuyZero at 4:37 PM PST - 43 comments

"...adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars."

In honor of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., his hometown NPR station, WABE, has organized content devoted to his memory and the memory of those events: ATL1968 [more inside]
posted by hydropsyche at 4:37 PM PST - 8 comments

Diss Pair and Hurt Rendang Outcry

MasterChef contestant Zaleha Kadir Olpin was eliminated last week when her chicken rendang — a traditional, slow cooked coconut and meat dish — didn't have crispy skin. People were not pleased with the decision. [more inside]
posted by lucidium at 3:57 PM PST - 86 comments

Make America Grodd Again

Q: Can someone explain what’s going on with the DC superhero shows on the CW
A: This week's episode of DC's Legends of Tomorrow, "Guest Starring John Noble" [sic], as summarized by mordax (SPOILERS!): "So the team saved a young Barack Obama1 from a telepathic gorilla from the future, [more inside]
posted by nicebookrack at 2:42 PM PST - 78 comments

Ugly Medieval Cats

The bad looking cats of classical painting [Content warning: Ugly is in the eye of the beholder] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:00 PM PST - 45 comments

"Not the best-looking girl in her class but definitely in the top five."

"Film is a visual medium, and a screenwriter might have plenty of reasons to describe a female character’s look beyond simply flattering an actress or enticing the reader. Still, it’s striking to see how often and how thoroughly the female characters’ physical attributes are dissected {...] Take this description by Quentin Tarantino of the first woman we see in his film Death Proof, the radio DJ played by Sydney Tamiia Poitier:
A tall (maybe 6ft) Amazonian Mulatto goddess walks down her hallway, dressed in a baby tee, and panties that her big ass (a good thing) spill out of, and her long legs grow out of. Her big bare feet slap on the hard wood floor. She moves to the cool rockabilly beat as she paces like a tiger putting on her clothes. Outside her apartment she hears a 'Honk Honk.' She sticks her long mane of silky black curly hair, her giraffish neck and her broad shoulders, out of the window and yells to a car below."
How 50 Famous Female Characters Were Described In Their Screenplays [Kyle Buchanan and Jordan Crucchiola, Vulture] [more inside]
posted by Atom Eyes at 11:17 AM PST - 99 comments

Insert glitterbomb joke here...

Sparkly pizza, bagels and gravy - Nothing is safe from edible glitter’s reach: First things first: There is a difference between “edible” and “nontoxic” glitter. This is an important distinction you will need to remember if you want to participate in what is shaping up to be one of 2018’s biggest and most controversial trends: decorating everything from cookies to pizza with a sprinkling of shiny sparkles. And no, it’s not the kind you buy in the craft aisle. Glitter pizza. Glitter bagels. Glitter beer. [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 11:12 AM PST - 47 comments

welcome to WUBRG

How can we use the Magic: The Gathering color wheel (White, Blue, Black, Red, Green) as a fake framework to "draw interesting connections, make surprisingly useful predictions, identify deficits and growth areas, and increase empathy for ways of being that are different from your own"?
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:29 AM PST - 41 comments

"Lost Penis" is not really a good name for a song

"['Detachable Penis'] was a nice little New York underground art-poetry scene thing that somehow burbled up into your MTV/SPIN world." [more inside]
posted by J.K. Seazer at 8:03 AM PST - 67 comments

The day England won the Olympics was one of the worst days of my life

Gentrification, white elephants and overpriced social housing: six years later, Dr Penny Bernstock and Dr Juliet Davis try to answer the question, who are the real Olympic winners?
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 7:59 AM PST - 24 comments

Kitten Season: Chloe, Ramona, & Rula kitten watch

Meet Chloe, Ramon, and Rula, three pregnant feral cats, all due in the next two weeks. (YT live cam) They come from a colony of more than 230 feral cats, where 90% have been spayed/neutered thanks to Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) efforts. Grandpa Mason, a terminally ill, battle-scarred feral cat, requested a litter of kittens, and the universe answered in a big way. (Previously) Grandpa Mason has already met Chloe, and they get along very well. (link to FB video)
posted by gladly at 7:29 AM PST - 98 comments

Safety Not Guaranteed

The Rise in Self-Proclaimed Time Travelers: They’ve come from the future for two reasons: 1) To save us from ourselves; and 2) to make YouTube confessionals.
posted by Cash4Lead at 6:02 AM PST - 44 comments

How do you make art for lawyers?

Animator Rory WT was commissioned to make art for lawyers in London. But what's it all about? What kind of stuff do they like? This is his story.
posted by nerdfish at 5:31 AM PST - 4 comments

Have You Herd? Farmer Writes A Memoo Using Cows And Satellite Imagery

Letter art with whole Kansas cows. As seen from space. [more inside]
posted by Transl3y at 4:27 AM PST - 17 comments

There's nothing super about 'super gonorrhoea'

Another victory for the bugs in today's antibiotics arms race Few people today have experience of life just a century ago where infections we now regard as mundane would often be fatal or seriously debilitating. And the jury is still out as to whether we can avoid going back there. If we get this wrong the impact on health and burden of disease is hard to imagine. Having to live with untreatable chronic gonorrhea could make life thoroughly miserable. Even worse, perhaps, is the spectre of treatment resistant syphilis - with its effects on both the body and the mind. Before antibiotics rendered it treatable tertiary syphilis was responsible for a large proportion of long-term psychiatric hospitalizations.
posted by Neil Hunt at 3:30 AM PST - 26 comments

Mongosity

Silly mongoose.
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 12:48 AM PST - 9 comments

April 3

Calling out in transit

Zero Books is a leader in publishing current critical theory, radical philosophy, aesthetics, film theory, experimental fiction, and the avant-garde. They "aim to publish books that make our readers uncomfortable, books that require authors go beyond hot takes and received opinions. Zer0 Books is on the left and wants to reinvent the left." Zero Squared is a philosophy podcast from Zero Books. The latest guest is Shaun Scott, a Seattle-based writer, historian, and filmmaker who wrote a column entitled "In Defense of Call-out Culture." Unrelated but loosely connected on topic is 'The problem of hyper-liberalism'. [more inside]
posted by spaceburglar at 11:57 PM PST - 31 comments

Coloradans are too optimistic to live in a prison of patio sets!

Denver news anchor Kyle Clark has had it with your trite photos of snow-covered patio furniture.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:31 PM PST - 29 comments

Friends don't let friends snort condoms

Teens are sniffing condoms through their noses and having them come out of their mouths.
posted by Literaryhero at 8:58 PM PST - 66 comments

...a full octave higher than the score!!!

In an alternate universe, the recruiting alien from The Last Starfighter got together with the mom from the Partridge Family and the narrator from Arrested Development and filmed a musical together. OH WAIT THAT'S THIS UNIVERSE!

I've had the 1962 Original Movie Soundtrack for The Music Man [YT playlist] memorized for so many decades I once freaked out an entire room of people by doing Rock Island and Iowa Stubborn along with the movie while it was playing on TCM. Side A: Main Title / Rock Island / Iowa Stubborn, Ya Got Trouble, Piano Lesson & If You Don't Mind My Saying So, Goodnight My Someone, Ya Got Trouble & Seventy-Six Trombones, Sincere, The Sadder But Wiser Girl, Pick-A-Little Talk-A-Little [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 8:23 PM PST - 76 comments

No Justice! No Pride!

Last year, Trans Queer Pueblo protested Phoenix Pride’s pride parade. This year, conflict over police presence, and sponsorship by corporations viewed as anti-immigration, remains unresolved, despite the theme of this year’s Pride Festival being “United We Stand: Equality For All.
posted by Grandysaur at 7:49 PM PST - 4 comments

Ding Ding Ding, Let the One Fight Begin

Every couple has one core fight that replays over and over again, in different disguises, over the course of their relationship. In Slate's One Fight series, "couples analyze the origin and mechanics of their One Fight". Recent fights include Stability vs. Adventure , The Scorekeeper vs. the Pitcher-Inner, and Fast vs. Slow.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 4:31 PM PST - 91 comments

“...doomed to relive that same moment over and over again.”

'Minit' Is a Speedy Triumph, Where The Goal Is Simple: Live, Die, Repeat [Waypoint] “You wake up in your little house. There’s a little dog. And a timer, counting down sixty seconds. Shit! Time to get going. You stumble out into a sprawling, monochrome map. North? West? One way is blocked. Thirty seconds. You find a lighthouse. You climb up, as the timer ticks down. As the seconds slip away, you find an important quest item. Ding! Sixty seconds done. You wake up in your little house. There’s a dog… and oh yeah, you have that quest item now. So you use this run to explore a new area or use your new ability.” [YouTube][Gameplay Trailer] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 2:33 PM PST - 22 comments

Vintage Italian Scooters

A collector is putting a huge collection of scooters up for auction. The auction begin on 8 April in Vienna. Here's the link to the auction catalogue
posted by MovableBookLady at 1:09 PM PST - 19 comments

slackety-slack-slack-slackers

"After Richard Linklater’s Slacker became an unexpected box-office hit in 1991, every major studio in the United States dropped untold amounts of money trying to clone its success — that is, to duplicate a film that cost $23,000 to make and whose entire raison d’etre was that it did not care about success. Some offerings, such as Cameron Crowe’s Singles (1992), succeeded in spite of their own distributors’ low expectations. Others, such as then “indie comic” (!) Ben Stiller’s Reality Bites, succeeded in spite of, or probably because of, their own craven cynicism. (There was also Threesome, Lord help us all.) These films relied, without exception, on two crucial tropes: the cynical cool of rejecting ambition and popularity, and the mopey, tortured Gen X man-child who embodied that cool." Rebecca Schuman writes for Longreads, You’ve Reached the Winter of Our Discontent: A half-assed elegy for the Cool-Loser Dream Boy of Gen-X cinema.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 1:00 PM PST - 92 comments

Ventriloquism.

Meshell Ndegeocello has released an album of covers, including a reinvention of TLC’s Waterfalls. Other tracks include Prince’s Sometimes it Snows in April and Tina Turner’s Private Dancer. [more inside]
posted by roger ackroyd at 11:50 AM PST - 9 comments

The Canvas Is Your Face

John Cena and Ike Barinholtz narrate a makeup tutorial.
posted by ellieBOA at 11:21 AM PST - 8 comments

Ah, the Eternal Question

At this start of the fiscal year of 2018, we now have the Internet to answer the age-old question: Is there any way you can use leftover coffee from yesterday morning? [SLYT]
posted by Smart Dalek at 10:14 AM PST - 51 comments

Beyind Reform

New York City's monument to racism and apathy in the criminal justice system is set to be shuttered - but that might not be enough. Closing Rikers Island. (The Nib) Half The People Awaiting Trial In NYC Jails Are There Because They Can't Afford Bail. (Gothamist) The Case For Closure (PDF). Bail and speedy trail reforms left out of Coumo’s State budget.
posted by The Whelk at 10:04 AM PST - 8 comments

My editors did me no favors by choosing to publish this

Point: I am tired of being a Jewish man’s rebellion

Counterpoint: How Dare Jewish Men Keep Breaking Up With Me [more inside]
posted by griphus at 9:57 AM PST - 214 comments

"I guess that made an impression on some people. It wasn't very smooth."

Seagulls, Tourists, Pepperoni and eventually, Redemption. A Dartmouth, Nova Scotia man gets his ban from the Fairmont Empress Hotel in Victoria lifted after 17 years. Story by Anjuli Patil.
posted by Navelgazer at 9:55 AM PST - 25 comments

Hobbitat for Huge Manatee

Lindsay Ellis takes a look into what went down in the making of The Hobbit trilogy in her long-form retrospective review.
Part 1: A Long-Expected Autopsy
Part 2: The Battle of Five Studios
posted by Christ, what an asshole at 9:50 AM PST - 37 comments

Braille for everyone

Braille Neue is a combination of OCR-styled Latin characters and Braille dots, readable by the blind and sighted equally well. It's not the first of its kind, and the site cites a few earlier examples, but it's a new (and to my eyes more attractive) design. The author hopes to see it used at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
posted by wanderingmind at 8:42 AM PST - 32 comments

In Defense of Design Thinking, Which Is Terrible

What to do with design thinking? ... It can be superficial, it can be misleading, and it can produce bad design... Even so, design thinking is still a useful lesson in how we, as designers, think about the democratization of our craft.
- Khoi Vinh talks about the democratization of design at the School of Visual Arts' Master's Program in Design Research. [more inside]
posted by jenkinsEar at 6:46 AM PST - 33 comments

No more chips for you, but let's not have another meltdown

Apple will reportedly ditch Intel chips in Macs as early as 2020. [SL The Verge]
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 5:58 AM PST - 162 comments

I just started filming my jams

Tash Sultana is a young multi-instrumentalist who filmed her jams. Jungle (8 min), Mystic (4 min), Synergy (6 min), and more. Here's a Notion (12 min) of what she is like live. Want more? Here's an hour of Sultana performing a couple of weeks ago at Lollapalooza, Chile. [more inside]
posted by Thella at 5:39 AM PST - 10 comments

April 2

Dirt changed my life.

The HMX 500 does not need an introduction when it comes to the New Zealand old school BMX scene.
posted by spaceburglar at 10:24 PM PST - 3 comments

'I like low tones, polite enthusiasm, courteous complaints."

Author Elena Ferrante: I make an effort, at least in the artificial universe that is delineated by writing, never to exaggerate with an exclamation mark. Of all the punctuation marks, it’s the one I like the least. It suggests a commander’s staff, a pretentious obelisk, a phallic display.

Editor Elaine Benes: I disagree, I really disagree!
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 9:28 PM PST - 70 comments

It's so deep I don't think that I can speak about it

The Sensual World [full album, ~45m] is a 1989 album from Kate Bush. If you've never listened to it before, you should. If you have listened to it before, you should also listen to it. Side A: The Sensual World [video], Love And Anger [video], The Fog, Reaching Out, Heads We're Dancing [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 7:40 PM PST - 51 comments

A More Scientific Approach to Improving Education

The Education Endowment Foundation is a UK non-profit researching what works and what doesn't in public education, where students are the guinea pigs. Through its close ties with the UK government, the EEF tries to find evidence on best practices in education, then deliver the evidence to teachers. Studies range across the spectrum, from peer tutoring to summer schooling. The "yardstick" used to measure impact is how many "months forward" a student's education moves as a result of an education program, such as "outdoor adventure learning." The results are posted as "Evidence Summaries." [more inside]
posted by hexaflexagon at 5:08 PM PST - 6 comments

20/M PLAYING FOOTBALL INJURED BUTTOCKS STRAIN BUTTOCK

american injuries (@usinjuries) is "...a bot that tweets descriptions of emergency room visits from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System. By @collinskeith." (CW: injuries) [more inside]
posted by Existential Dread at 4:28 PM PST - 40 comments

None of the authorities are here to help you.

A Betrayal: The teenager told police all about his gang, MS-13. In return, he was slated for deportation and marked for death. In an absolutely horrifying case involving bureaucracy, racism, and apathy at the hands of the FBI, ICE, and MS-13, a young man risked his life to help the FBI catch gang members and murderers; they hung him out to dry. ICE ordered him deported via the same facility to which they'd sent the MS-13 members he'd informed on, eventually sending a memo explicitly detailing how he informed on the gang and its members. The Trump administration is repeating many of the circumstances that lead to the establishment of MS-13 in the first place. TW: Violence, murder. [more inside]
posted by MaximumTaco at 2:30 PM PST - 31 comments

I vote therefore I am clueless

Voter Behavior: The Power of Groupthink in Trump's America - a special report (SLEconomist) "...people may well decide which candidate they like and then ascribe policies they approve of to him or her, often incorrectly. Each presidential-election year the ANES asks voters to place themselves on a spectrum with “many more services” on the left to “reduce spending a lot” on the right, and then to place the two main political parties somewhere on that spectrum. About 15% decline, or say they have not thought about it. The same number, more or less, will place themselves but cannot place the parties, meaning that 30% of the electorate does not have a good sense of where Republicans and Democrats stand on the most fundamental question about the role of the state." [more inside]
posted by storybored at 12:48 PM PST - 66 comments

They Feel Good

Delightful funk covers by Scary Pockets: The Scientist, All the Small Things, Love Yourself, Since You've Been Gone, Shape of You, Toxic, Humble.
posted by gwint at 11:44 AM PST - 5 comments

Teeth studded her eyelids, the twisted geometry of her limbs

In response to YA author Gwen C. Katz examining an author's claims about his facility with writing female characters, writer/podcaster Whit Reynolds proposed a Twitter game: Describe yourself the way a male author would. [more inside]
posted by rewil at 10:43 AM PST - 40 comments

And I said / What about / The Mothman Prophecies

Movies That Would More or Less Scan the Same But Arguably Make for More Interesting Replacements for the Titular Film Referenced in the Chorus of Deep Blue Something’s 1995 Hit Single “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 10:35 AM PST - 77 comments

Throw off the chains of fast social media

The author of Deep Work describes how to benefit from the Social Internet without being consumed by Social Media. Practicing slow social media allows you to maintain the hard to replace value that these services might provide you, while at the same time neutering their ability to transform you into a pawn in their algorithmic attention economy games. [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 10:07 AM PST - 29 comments

Wakanda Shakes the World

Foreign Policy (1 April): It’s been six weeks since the “Wakanda speech,” and the world is still reeling. [more inside]
posted by cendawanita at 9:19 AM PST - 18 comments

Attack oligarchs at home and abroad

“The next administration should make the case that the transnational oligarchy spanning from New York to London to Moscow isn’t merely greedy but also poses a threat to national security by undermining the integrity of the political process. It should expand FARA and end foreign lobbying, both legal and illegal, on K Street. It should crack down on money laundering through banks and real estate, as well as offshore tax havens.” How Progressives Should Think About Russia - David Klion, The Nation.
posted by The Whelk at 8:38 AM PST - 33 comments

Internet Trolls Vs Comics

#Comicsgate: How an Anti-Diversity Harassment Campaign in Comics Got Ugly—and Profitable
posted by Artw at 7:51 AM PST - 19 comments

Winnie Mandela has died

Anti-apartheid activist and later human rights criminal Winnie Mandela has died at 81 (SL NYT obit)
posted by stillmoving at 7:50 AM PST - 17 comments

enough to generate internal weather patterns, some say

"It has been said that Tesla’s Gigafactory 1, currently under construction in Nevada, will be the biggest building in the world, if completed as planned, in 2020. Though superlatives like this are usually more a comparison of ways of measuring than empirical fact, it does provoke a consideration of the outer limits of enclosed space. If the Gigafactory, and the overall economy of scale, suggests that big boxes are getting bigger and bigger (Tesla even has other gigafactories in the works too), then perhaps it is interesting to consider the current state of the art of megaspace." The Center for Land Use Interpretation takes a look a megastructures in Building Big: The Outer Limits of Enclosure
posted by everybody had matching towels at 7:09 AM PST - 15 comments

"The constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here"

Whaling History , launched this week, is an online collection of comprehensive data on the North American whaling industry, 1700-1920, including every known whaling voyage (over 15,000) as well as logbooks recording day-to-day whale sightings and takings by type and location and crew lists with detail on people involved in the industry. A project of Mystic Seaport and the New Bedford Whaling Museum, it's the most comprehensive database of whaling material ever to be available. Users are encouraged to share their projects. [more inside]
posted by Miko at 7:06 AM PST - 4 comments

It really could have been anyone.

"Having killed two people and hit three others, Dorothy Bruns did not receive a summons. Had her car not been wrecked, she might have been allowed to drive home. A couple of weeks after the crash, we learned that she had reportedly hit another pedestrian in September and sped off. Paperwork that would have led to a deeper review had gone unfiled. Like Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland shooter, she was recognizably unfit to handle a dangerous machine, known and perhaps flagged by the authorities but not stopped, leading to violent, preventable death. And a lot of people seem to think of a driver’s license in near-purist Second Amendment terms: as a right that can be revoked under only the most extreme circumstances." What New York Should Learn From the Park Slope Crash That Killed Two Children.
posted by showbiz_liz at 7:00 AM PST - 96 comments

Not to be Crass, but slob-a-dob-a-dob bing! bing! bing!

Amebix Risen A documentary about everyone's favourite west country anarcho-crust-punk band. Best known for crossing the salty pentagram lines atwixt punk/goth/metal and helping birth the whole thrash-metal thing. There is also anime, sword making, Hawkwind reminiscence, and unfriendly felines. [more inside]
posted by Buntix at 6:45 AM PST - 6 comments

You'll still need that universal translator, Mr La Forge

Tom Scott introduces Rikki Poynter explaining why sign language isn't universal [SLYT] [4:31] [subtitles]
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 5:52 AM PST - 2 comments

Let's be careful out there.

Steven Bochco, the 10-time Emmy Award-winning co-creator, producer and showrunner of such groundbreaking TV police dramas as Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, NYPD Blue, and (non-cop) Doogie Howser, M.D., died on Sunday of complications of leukemia at the age of 74. [more inside]
posted by rory at 4:18 AM PST - 43 comments

I think it all has to do with the gelatin sphere.

The Soft Truth. A short story by Leigh Alexander.
posted by Gin and Broadband at 3:57 AM PST - 12 comments

April 1

"I think it's about 50-50"

Fabiano Caruana 1st American since Bobby Fischer to reach World Chess Championship: In what's being billed as a historic result for American chess, 25-year-old Fabiano Caruana has emerged after an 18-day competition in Berlin, Germany, as the next challenger for the World Championship title. He will face off against reigning World Champion Magnus Carlsen of Norway in November in a 12-game one-on-one match. A U.S. grandmaster hasn't won the title of undisputed champion since 1972, when Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky of the USSR. [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 11:00 PM PST - 11 comments

" I wanted to reply that maybe her engineers should be scared."

Lessons from Optics, The Other Deep Learning - Ali Rahimi
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:21 PM PST - 9 comments

Harpejji? I hardly knew ji!

The Harpejji is a stringed instrument that's a cross between a guitar, bass guitar, and piano. It's played by tapping. Mathieu Terrade is a virtuoso: Africa | Bohemian Rhapsody | Mr. Sandman | Moonlight Sonata (Harpejji previously)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:39 PM PST - 17 comments

IV normal saline: a medical habit

“Primarily a treatment for dehydration, normal saline is given without a second thought for a variety of conditions, from vomiting to fast heart rates to lightheadedness. For such a ubiquitous treatment, you'd probably expect that saline has been thoroughly studied and refined. As it turns out, that was never really the case at all. Now there's a rethinking about whether saline is really the best way to go.” - Why Did Sterile Salt Water Become The IV Fluid Of Choice?
posted by supercrayon at 7:43 PM PST - 49 comments

Gulls enjoy crapping on us

Bird poop People with brown hair are particularly at risk of being targeted...
posted by gryphonlover at 4:04 PM PST - 25 comments

I think there’s something very positive about being trans.

For Transgender Day of Visibility, The Independent interviews a wide spectrum of trans activists, asking how cis people can be better allies in 2018.
posted by loquacious at 11:15 AM PST - 57 comments

Children saw the eye as a sign from God descending from the sky

Ween's 1997 album The Mollusk [Full Album, ~45m] is difficult to describe. Perhaps if Sgt Pepper was in the Navy and did way too much LSD while huffing laughing gas. Cassette Side A: I'm Dancing In The Show Tonight, The Mollusk, Polka Dot Tail, I'll Be Your Jonny On The Spot, Mutilated Lips, The Blarney Stone (NSFW), It's Gonna Be (Alright) [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 11:02 AM PST - 31 comments

#RiceBunny, the #metoo movement, and censorship in China

How feminists in China are using emoji to avoid censorship (Wired). Business Insider gets into how #ricebunny localizes the #metoo movement to China, with some discussion of success, and also of the impacts of censorship. The Conversation offers more history on the evolution of #metoo in Chinese culture. Throughout there is some discussion of the ways homophones are used in China to avoid censorship.
posted by bile and syntax at 9:31 AM PST - 3 comments

Child slavery is a crime against humanity

Happy Easter: Does Your Chocolate Come From Slaves?
The probably answer is yes. Child Labor and Slavery in the Chocolate Industry.
The boy with the machete is watching us. Behind a bittersweet industry; What will it take to fix the problem? [more inside]
posted by adamvasco at 8:17 AM PST - 63 comments

Always Be'ing and Do'ing, Never Cheesing or Choosing

The trend seems to be to post long-awaited updates on April Fools Day so no one expects them. And so Homestar Runner has released a new Strong Bad email. YouTube version for the Flash deprived or annoyed. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 3:40 AM PST - 25 comments