February 15, 2014

What Exactly Is Curling?

A    gentle      slow     sport    -   with brooms and yelling [more inside]
posted by vapidave at 11:41 PM PST - 93 comments

The Wisdom of Crowds

For the past three days, the world of streaming gaming has been riveted by an unlikely phenomenon: Twitch Plays Pokemon. Consisting of a live Twitch.TV chatroom hooked up to a classic Game Boy emulation of Pokémon Red, the program is set to recognize a limited number of commands and execute them in real time, allowing an audience of tens of thousands to collectively control the action as they watch. An astonishing amount of progress has been made, including the dramatic last-second defeat of a third gym leader (GIF) and the solution of a notoriously tricky puzzle on the very first attempt. But all for naught, it seems, as Team Twitch finds itself hilariously stranded on the ledges of Route 19 where, as one viewer explained, "they basically have to walk a small path for about ten spaces without anyone pushing down and jumping Red off the ledge," a grim democratic reality the dedicated subreddit /r/twitchplayspokemon has had all kinds of fun with over the last dozen ludicrous hours.
posted by Rhaomi at 10:15 PM PST - 102 comments

Somtimes Some Frisson

Alex Boyé is a British-born singer of Nigerian descent who does some pretty sweet covers: Let It Go (featuring 11 year old Lexi Walker), Royals, Ho Hey (with Brigham Larson), Paradise (with ThePianoGuys).
posted by Lutoslawski at 9:50 PM PST - 15 comments

An old view of the Old City

What did Palestine look like in 1896?
posted by flapjax at midnite at 9:09 PM PST - 23 comments

Wooooop​woot​wooop​woot​ootoot

HTML Theremin Headphones optional. Supposedly better in Chrome or IE, but I had no problem in FF.
posted by pjern at 9:06 PM PST - 18 comments

Where I See Fashion

Where I See Fashion is a tumblr which pairs fashion-related pictures with images containing art/​architecture/​nature/​design/​texture elements that could have conceivably inspired them. The "Click to Hide Text" link on the left offers more streamlined viewing experience, or check them out on Instagram. Via: 1, 2
posted by zarq at 9:05 PM PST - 6 comments

Sleep Sweet, Sweetums

John Paul Henson, who has been playing beloved Muppet Sweetums since 1991, has died of a sudden heart attack at the age of 48.
posted by MissySedai at 6:57 PM PST - 67 comments

Florida's Python Patrol

'One trainee, 70-year-old Eric Raits, has now caught three pythons while working as a tour guide at Shark Valley Tram Tours in Everglades. Once, lacking a bag into which to deposit the snake, he simply held on to the 9-foot python for the remaining half of the two-hour tour. “I was sitting in the backwards-facing seat with the snake coiled up around my arm,” he says. “Unsurprisingly, no one sat in the two rows closest to me. They were all in the back, sitting on each other’s laps.” ' [more inside]
posted by Quietgal at 6:04 PM PST - 24 comments

Schwinn 1890's Photgraphs

Schwinn 1890's Lake Street Factory Photographs
posted by Confess, Fletch at 5:10 PM PST - 26 comments

Whale Ho

The Charles W. Morgan is the world's last remaining wooden whaleship. Her unusually long career included 37 whaling voyages between 1841 and 1921. Over the past few years, she's received a full restoration by the skilled shipwrights at the Mystic Seaport Museum Shipyard, and is in the final stages of outfitting for her 38th voyage, an ambituous plan to make her seaworthy enough to sail her one final time and visit her original homeport of New Bedford, MA, along with many of the ports she frequented in her working days, before she returns to her permanent berth. Among the crew will be one stowaway, a crew member chosen via a selective process including a video application, who'll use video and social media to tell the stories of the voyage, the crew, the accompanying scholars and artists, and what it's like to make amends with whales.
posted by Miko at 4:33 PM PST - 21 comments

Should we talk about the weather?

Pronbably to no one's surprise, Southern California leads the nation in the number of pleasant days per year (mean temperature between 55° F and 75° F, no precipitation). How does your city stack up?
posted by Horace Rumpole at 3:52 PM PST - 87 comments

"What did you do? Did you do that?"

A collection of guilty dogs caught bang to rights. If you are a dog and are confronted for some misdeed, just follow these steps: avoid eye contact, roll over, or simply walk towards your owner veeeery sloooowly.
posted by billiebee at 3:50 PM PST - 70 comments

The Hindus

Why free speech loses in India “The Hindus: An Alternative History,” an eight-hundred-page book by Wendy Doniger, an eminent professor of religion at the University of Chicago, will be removed from Indian book shops. Penguin Books India, which first published the book, in 2009, signed an out-of-court settlement with an advocacy group, the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, who claim to be defending 'the sentiments of Hindus all over the world.'"
posted by dhruva at 1:38 PM PST - 35 comments

808 State, interpreted through steel drums, and a brass band

Last year, English conceptual artist Jeremy Deller went to Trinidad to have "Pacific State", the English dance anthem by 808 State, reworked on steel drums. He gave the project to Michelle Huggins-Watts and the Valley Harps steel pan drum group to see where they'd take it. Here is the result. Before that, he also brought a similar idea to the Williams Fairey Brass Band, and they re-arranged 808 State's "Pacific 202" (original version, for comparison).
posted by filthy light thief at 1:38 PM PST - 16 comments

Happy cows are happy

For those of you trapped in frigid climes, here is a vision of spring to look forward to: Happy Cows [more inside]
posted by jammy at 1:36 PM PST - 18 comments

I GET MY IRON FROM BEEF LIVER! SAME AS STAN LEE!

DC vs Marvel: Kitchen Stadium Edition -- In The Mighty Marvel Superheroes Cookbook, "Mighty Marvel Superheros show you how to perform heroics in the kitchen creating meals that are out of this world!" Meanwhile.... The DC Super Heroes Super Healthy Cookbook simply promises "good food kids can prepare themselves." Let the battle begin! [more inside]
posted by Room 641-A at 1:24 PM PST - 31 comments

Suction Cup 2.0

Personnel Vacuum Assisted Climber
posted by ActingTheGoat at 12:26 PM PST - 25 comments

Celebrate Design

AIGA, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, is celebrating its centennial year in 2014 with a microsite called 100 Years of Design. It highlights the intersections of design and society through exemplary works from the AIGA Design Archives, interviews with living masters, quotes from leading designers and significant moments from the organization’s history. Together, these elements form a narrative about the impact of design; how it connects, delights, influences and assists us.
Via
posted by infini at 12:00 PM PST - 15 comments

At some point I tried drugs, and it turned out that I loved them.

"I don’t feel like I deserve a second chance. I just want one." He lost it all to meth. The marriage. The money. The job covering crime. "Everybody that I talked to later said that they knew. Knew I was doing it. The police, who were my sources, City Council members, knew I was high. I was like why didn't they say something? They just accepted it." [more inside]
posted by cashman at 11:08 AM PST - 29 comments

You believe that true love is a zero-sum game traded in sex.

On the Kinds of Love We Fall Into: Polyamory in Theory and Practice
posted by anotherpanacea at 10:15 AM PST - 67 comments

Italian Author Eugenio Corti has died.

Born in 1921 in Besana, Brianza the first of ten children (his younger brother was Dr Piero Corti), early fascinated by Homer. At age 21 he entered the Italian army as a lieutenant of Artillery and volunteered for the Russian front, less in order to further Hitler's ambitions than to retard Stalin's. Ordered to retreat in mid-winter, he led his men back to Italy where he eventually reconnected with the King's army and fought with the Allies. [more inside]
posted by IndigoJones at 10:10 AM PST - 2 comments

"I’m here today because I am gay. "

Juno star Ellen Page announced she is gay during a speech at a human rights conference in Las Vegas on Friday. [SLYT] Transcript of her remarks here. [PDF]
posted by Fizz at 9:42 AM PST - 109 comments

Scalia: the unlikely hero of gay rights

Happy Valentine's day from Justice Scalia: (video) how his dissent in DOMA case US v. Windsor (PDF here) helped lead to recent rulings against state gay marriage bans.
posted by shivohum at 8:28 AM PST - 29 comments

Steam Tags

This past week the digital game distribution service Steam unveiled a new beta feature: user contributed tags for games. Unsurprisingly, the feature was quickly abused, leading to Steam introducing means to moderate tag usage. The plus side to all of this is that you can now play a game where you match Steam tags to the games they describe! Steam Tags: The Game
posted by codacorolla at 7:55 AM PST - 31 comments

life, death, pity and accusation

March 11 will mark the tenth anniversary of M 11 - the Madrid train bombings in which 192 people were killed. Projet 192 coordinated by Ciro Prota sees 192 photographers each making one black and white image to remember a victim. One photograph for each victim, and each name written “inside” the picture, on a piece of paper... (Controls for zooming and reducing of page turning sound are at the bottom left of the gallery)
posted by mattoxic at 7:09 AM PST - 3 comments

"That’s an awful long nap she’s taking"

"I thought you were sleeping. It seems silly now, but you must understand, when one sees a person slumped over inside a parked car, the most reasonable conclusion is rarely that the person slumped over is dead. It was the lights from the dashboard that caught my eye." – This Crappy Obituary – For the Woman I Found Dead in the Starbucks Parking Lot. You know you should never read the comments, but read the comments.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:14 AM PST - 97 comments

Eat your K rations and like it

Hundreds of newsreel and publicity films from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s -- the golden era of instructional, scientific, government, and industry films -- are now available on YouTube via users like Ella's Archive (focusing on transport and technology), Val73TV4 (British Council portraits of English towns & more), NuclearVault (war and diplomacy) and others.

How about starting with The Big Delivery Wagon (1951) a Heinz-sponsored spot about nationwide food distribution? Or ‪Native Foods: Commandments For Health (1945)‬, a U.S. Navy animated training film featuring Private McGillicuddy, who neither likes Vienna sausage nor seems to know that local foods are full of "poison more treacherous than a Jap warlord." Maybe Choosing For Happiness (1950) has some choice dating tips for even today's women? Or show your kid Defense Against Invasion (1943) in which a doctor explains to a fearful child exactly why he ought to get immunized.
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:54 AM PST - 5 comments

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