January 30, 2018
Internalised misogyny and Twilight
Dear Stephenie Meyer: I'm Sorry. Lindsay Ellis addresses the misogyny that underpinned a lot of Twilight criticism back in its heyday.
Molecular Redistribution
"The following conversation is one of a regular series of conversations that I have with my 13-year-old dog, Raika. Some of our conversations are funny and some are sad, but many will ring true for anyone who has the pleasure, and heartbreak, of owning a dog coming near the end of her life." [more inside]
best shirt for storing bats
#Review for Science "We lay-folk have long known that scientists use common objects for strange reasons — see NASA researchers sending rubber ducks into a glacier to track ocean currents, or environmental scientists floating tampons down streams to find pollution. But until now, we may not have understood the scope or, frankly, the grossness of the phenomenon."
Helen Dunmore Dun Gud
Author Helen Dunmore posthumously wins the Costa poetry prize. British author and poet Helen Dunmore has posthumously won the Costa prize for Book of the Year with her poetry collection Inside The Wave. Notably the inaugural winner of the Orange prize for fiction with A Spell Of Winter, she produced a number of novels, poetry collection and children's novels over her career.
As psychedelic as possible, under the circumstances
We're taking a meandering musical trip through late 60's musical Canada starting in Toronto's Yorkville, where hippies and draft dodgers like "Bill" (William Gibson) were gathering. In one attempt to make sense of it all, in 1968 the NFB (National Film Board of Canada) gave cameras to a group of kids and made Christopher's Movie Matinee - check out this great scene which refers to Yorkville and makes some timely observations. [more inside]
Tabasco, the burlesque opera from 1894, rediscovered and performed anew
26 years after Edmund McIlhenny, a Maryland-born former banker who moved to Louisiana first made and marketed Tabasco sauce, the condiment was so well known in the United States that a group of military cadets in Boston commissioned the production of the Burlesque Opera of Tabasco as a way to raise money to help build a new armory in 1894. But due to alleged conflicts between composer George W. Chadwickand producer Thomas Q. Seabrooke, after the opera’s initial run, it faded into obscurity and was largely forgetten about—until now. The comic operetta singing the praises of a famous Louisiana pepper sauce performed in full to the public for the first time in 124 years, in New Orleans. [more inside]
A story so extraordinary…
The Cabinet Files - In a second-hand shop in Canberra there were two heavy filing cabinets to which no-one could find the keys. They were purchased for small change and sat unopened for some months. When they were opened by a nifty driller they were found to contain a trove of documents, many of them classified.
Tailoring In Metal
Nothing remains of the Royal Armor Workshops at Greenwich. What does remain are many of the great masterpieces of the Greenwich armorers, which allow us to stand in the presence of great princes and knights long dead. For those who take the time to look, they live on in ways their makers could never have imagined-Tobias Capwell
“...sometimes it’s better to just pick a direction and swim.”
Subnautica gave me the experience I wanted from No Man’s Sky [PC Gamer] “There’s just one planet in Subnautica, home to an expansive ocean teeming with peculiar flora and fauna. Explore its depths and you’ll find fields of dancing kelp, caves illuminated by fluorescent fungi, bubbling thermal vents, and sandy plains sprinkled with glowing plants. It’s a diverse, vibrant setting, and feels truly alien. And while it may be unfair to compare quintillions of procedurally generated planets to a static, hand-crafted one, playing Subnautica gives me exactly what I wanted from No Man’s Sky: landing on another world, exploring it, and being surprised by what I find there.” [YouTube][Game Trailer] [more inside]
It never goes out of fashion
"Here, a sporty yellow Indian-make motorbike; there, a bullet box from the Savage Arms gun company. Here, an ad for Columbia Pictures’ The Great Sioux Massacre; there, scale models of the U.S. military’s Chinook, Kiowa and Apache Longbow helicopters. It’s a dizzying blizzard of pop cultural artifacts with nothing at all in common—save for their reliance on Native American imagery." At the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, a new exhibition called "Americans" showcases how "American Indian images, names, and stories infuse American history and contemporary life." Explore the interactive exhibition website here. [more inside]
No Human Being Is Illegal
“Perhaps best of all, mass amnesty is quick and effective. No more fussing around with some elaborate tiered system or stuffing millions of people through a decades-long bureaucratic hell that will cost the government billions. Just one quick step, and we can move on to other problems.” - The Case For Full Amnesty
“Being a white nationalist in an extremely diverse country is to effectively hate that country. Immigration haters want to destroy the oldest, most distinguishing, and most interesting characteristics of our nation in favor of an invented tradition of chintzy white bread garbage.” The Myth Of America’s Immigration Problem - Ryan Cooper for The Week
“Being a white nationalist in an extremely diverse country is to effectively hate that country. Immigration haters want to destroy the oldest, most distinguishing, and most interesting characteristics of our nation in favor of an invented tradition of chintzy white bread garbage.” The Myth Of America’s Immigration Problem - Ryan Cooper for The Week
"How do you solve a problem like Mariaaaa"
Yesterday a Tweet of an inked graphic of two nuns dueling, posted by @_ElizabethMay, became one of the top trending topics for the site. In a subthread a user provided a bit of context (it was the front page of a police blotter type paper), and the text of the article. Don't worry, no blood was shed! [more inside]
Drinking whiskey faster than water
The Cult of Mary Beard
How a late-blossoming classics don became Britain’s most beloved intellectual by Charlotte Higgins examines how Mary Beard went from being a Cambridge professor of classics to being the kind of celebrity who has poems written about her and is depicted in Lego. Twice.
Star Wars Posters of Soviet Europe
Let Margaret of Anjou Out
What are kids texting about these days ? Anarcho-communism, Classical Music, Age of Empires, Violins, Minimalist Syntax, Astrophysics, Deep Learning, Chemical Engineering, Zelda, The Rebellion, Neoliberalism, Javascript, Drums, The War of 1812, Paleontology, Optics, Decolonization, Silmarillion, The War of the Roses, Machine Learning, or the Victorian Era.
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