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The Cycle of Life is a short animation by u m a m i that is something like an advertisement, full of melancholy and unsettling strangeness.
The soup appeared in previous u m a m i animation The End of an Era.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:12 PM PST - 7 comments

What it says on the tin.
posted by k8t at 9:46 PM PST - 33 comments

BuzzFeed will lay off about 15 percent. Vice has instituted a hiring freeze and is seeking to cut its workforce by about 10 to 15 percent this year. Vox, SB Nation and other sites - cut about 50 staffers early last year. Refinery29 dropped about 10 percent of its staff. Verizon Media Group, the owner of HuffPost, AOL and Yahoo, announced its own round of layoffs of about 7 percent. Mic laid off its entired editorial staff in November.
posted by Grandysaur at 9:34 PM PST - 70 comments

During the window in the late sixties and early seventies in which TTL and microcontroller technologies allowed more complex game logic but before the industry would standardize on the video displays for which it would come to be known, a public, social, and casual genre briefly rose to prominence: the wall game. [more inside]
posted by always_implicated at 9:05 PM PST - 25 comments

From Yahoo sports Meet Ace Davis, a 10-year-old kid from Lexington, Kentucky who created a science fair project about Tom Brady. While kids in New England might be trying to figure out how to scientifically prove that Brady is the greatest quarterback who ever lived, Ace decided to go in a different direction. He created a science fair project that proves that Brady is a cheater.
posted by gryphonlover at 8:09 PM PST - 34 comments

A one-inch craft pom-pom, a pair of googly eyes, a few bits of wire and foam. Sure, they're cheap and they may not sound that impressive, but as Atlas Obscura reports, the tiny promotional items known as Weepuls were a bit of a thing in the '70s and '80s. Of course, if you were ever unfortunate enough to be pressured into selling gift wrap or magazine subscriptions as a school fundraiser in the US, there's a good chance you're familiar with Weepuls already. The Outline calls Weepuls a sales cult: "It is a symbol of inequality, which has gotten so desperate that schools are mobilizing children to sell merchandise to pay for their own education." Weepuls' creator wrote a bit about their origin in an industry blog. If you're just here for a hit of nostalgia, you can take a peek at the Weepul catalog (PDF). Better yet, YouTuber emmymade can help you make your own.
posted by duffell at 8:01 PM PST - 32 comments

The sad, strange life and death of Devonte Hart: the crying black boy who famously hugged a cop. [Warning, child harm and abuse.] He was the black boy who hugged a white cop at a protest of the shooting death of Michael Brown. The famous photo, dubbed “the Hug Heard ‘Round the World,” also known as the “Ferguson Hug,” captured our ailing nation’s attention. Not just in America, but globally, his crying face pressed against a policeman’s chest suggested a spontaneous moment of healing. [more inside]
posted by triggerfinger at 7:20 PM PST - 26 comments

Researchers in Australia believe globally stockpiled sewage sludge could be used to make biosolids bricks, an advance that could boost sustainability in the construction industry. The paper: A Proposal for Recycling the World’s Unused Stockpiles of Treated Wastewater Sludge (Biosolids) in Fired-Clay Bricks. [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 5:24 PM PST - 26 comments

Weezer: The Teal Album (2019) is a collection of song covers the band released today [YouTube Music playlist, no subscription required] in response to the positive reception of their recording of Toto's Africa and also as a lead up to their upcoming The Black Album. Tracklisti: Africa [video], Everybody Wants To Rule The World, Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This), Take On Me, Happy Together, Paranoid, Mr. Blue Sky, No Scrubs [Chilli approves], Billie Jean, Stand By Me [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:21 PM PST - 64 comments

The powerful video for Gary Clark Jr's latest single "This Land" is directed by Savanah Leaf. [more inside]
posted by the primroses were over at 3:08 PM PST - 9 comments

While news consumption online is at an all time high, newsrooms like Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and newspapers all over are being forced to cut staff due to low revenue. The problem is that the major online players like Alphabet, Facebook, and Amazon are winding up with the lion's share of advertising revenue from content they did nothing to make, which is choking off the media. But, there are several ideas as to how to force a more fair distribution of funds. (SLSlate)
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:02 PM PST - 46 comments

Can giraffes swim?
posted by not_the_water at 2:49 PM PST - 21 comments

Sidney Wants to Be Someone Else by Max Marshall [Sports Illustrated] Rashun Richardson, the 17 year old basketball guard playing for Hillcrest High School is a good player, so good that dropping 30 points or more a game was a common occurrence. He lead his team to the playoffs and was district offensive MVP of the year. There's only one problem, Rashun Richardson was actually 25 year old Sidney Gilstrap-Portley. This is how a man posed as a teenager to become a high school star and was caught by the authorities. [YouTube][RealLyfe Street Starz Interview]
posted by Fizz at 12:27 PM PST - 16 comments

The 2019 movie Serenity "has a twist that is so out of left field, it feels like you have fallen into some drug-fueled fever dream." [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 11:56 AM PST - 105 comments

For the 2018 season, 33 Minor League Baseball hosted the first "Copa de la Diversión," or "Fun Cup," a season-long event series specifically designed to embrace the culture and values that resonate most with participating teams' local U.S. Hispanic/Latino communities (MiLB.com). The new initiative culminates more than two years of collaborative work and research with U.S. Hispanic/Latino civic organizations where each of the teams play, per Forbes, who also include the full list of Copa nombres and translations. Ranking The Best Team Names From MiLB's Copa de la Diversión (Sports Illustrated) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 11:51 AM PST - 6 comments

The purpose of this document (pdf) is to provide guidance to DoD program executives and acquisition professionals on how to detect software projects that are really using agile development versus those that are simply waterfall or spiral development in agile clothing (“agile-scrum-fall”).

posted by jenkinsEar at 10:55 AM PST - 138 comments

"I had a whole gaggle of 100-point bucks in my sights, sleeping peacefully on their feet, like cows. The way they were lined up, I could take down the whole clan in a single shot of gun, clean through their magnificent oversized brains. That’d be enough (deer) meat to last Nora and the baby through the harsh Amarillo winter. " Poorly Researched Men’s Fiction
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 10:34 AM PST - 46 comments

Do you live in Vermont? You already know about Front Porch Forum. Those outside of the Green Mountain state probably haven't heard of it. That's because this 18-year-old community website is only for residents of Vermont. [more inside]
posted by lubujackson at 9:30 AM PST - 14 comments

We may finally know what causes Alzheimer’s: the bacteria that cause gingivitis getting into the brain. Amyloid plaques could well be an immune response. Mouse model tests look promising in showing a causal relationship. Some preliminary human "are you serious is this a thing" trials with a gingivitis toxin blocker do also. Best news: a gingivitis vaccine is on the horizon.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:26 AM PST - 69 comments

On Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, culling deer is an act of cultural and ecological restoration. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 5:24 AM PST - 8 comments

Meet the Endpaper Enthusiasts: at The Guardian's books blog, Alison Flood extols the quiet delights of the We Love Endpapers Facebook group, where 'book lovers gather to sigh over the most beautiful decorative pages and compare techniques', while at The New Antiquarian, Simon Beattie (the group's founder) provides a Beginner's Guide to Decorated Book Pages. Elsewhere, at Atlas Obscura, Sarah Laskow writes of The Unsung Delight of a Well-Designed Endpaper, while at Hyperallergic, Allison Meier praises The Lost Beauty of Book Endpapers. Previously at MeFi: ebru; decorated paper.
posted by misteraitch at 5:10 AM PST - 9 comments

Mir Publishers was a major publisher in the Soviet Union. The short wikipedia entry is not even clear on its mission. The aim of the publishing house was to translate works of eminent Russian scientist into other languages and distribute them around the world. They were very high quality, cheap and "also published in many Indian languages: Hindi, Marathi and Bengali I know for sure" -- all printed in the Soviet Union. The group blog/portal Mir Books used to collect scans of questionable legality (ironically, mostly sourced from the darker corners of the russian web), but since a while, the English collection is also available on Archive.org. Books range from introduction to the sciences aimed at elementary school students to advanced textbooks, mostly in physics, mathematics, chemistry and engineering.
posted by kmt at 4:06 AM PST - 6 comments

Felissimo Nekobu, the "cat club" section of a Japanese online retailer, asked followers on Twitter to help prove that cats are liquid. SLTwitter thread. [more inside]
posted by misozaki at 2:03 AM PST - 29 comments

Is our tendency to project attributes of intelligence on cosmic phenomenon a reflection (ha) of our desire for telescopes to function as mirrors? Carl Sagan pondered this, and history is littered with examples. Pereidolia, explained. [more inside]
posted by St. Oops at 12:24 AM PST - 3 comments