February 15, 2018

Everyone needs one

Find you someone who's as happy to see you as this donkey. Or someone who wants to hug you as much as these animals.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:47 PM PST - 31 comments

Get Offa My Cloud!

Intimate Photos Escape the Cloud and Redistribute to Random Phone A man sets up a new smart phone for his gran. Looking through the images he has migrated for her, he notices images of someone he works with, a man and child. Verizon has no idea how images made it from the cloud to another party's phone. The folks whose privacy was dispensed out onto the web, are suing. This is some inborne, disastrous glitch. How much do they charge to go fishing in the cloud?
posted by Oyéah at 7:42 PM PST - 46 comments

“Everything good about Dead Space comes from its underlying cohesion,”

Dead Space Is My Favorite Horror Game [Odyssey] “The moment I saw my first necromorph in Dead Space is when I I fell in love with the franchise. I first stumbled upon Dead Space when I was looking through my cheat code book glossary. My mom was going to be taking me to the movie store where they also rented out video games and I wanted something new to play. I had an Xbox 360 at the time and didn't have too many games so I was looking to expand. I saw the words "Dead Space" and was instantly hooked. I flipped the pages to that section and scanned over all the black and white pictures. I loved the look of it. So when my mom took me to the movie store, I bolted for their game section looking for this game. I was scanning the shelves until my eyes rested on the title "Dead Space." The cover made me want the game even more. It was a severed arm floating in space. The entire cover encapsulated the title perfectly. I knew I was going to love this game.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:44 PM PST - 38 comments

Manifestos are important precisely because they are impractical.

Manifesto Jam is a game jam where participants don't make games but manifestos about games.
posted by RobotHero at 5:33 PM PST - 11 comments

Dirty birds drop fowl tweets

You got your swearing in my bird art! No, YOU got YOUR bird art in my swearing! Stop fighting, kids: Effin' Birds on Twitter brings you the best of both worlds. Bonus: The Story Behind the Foul-Mouthed ‘Effin’ Birds’ Twitter Account, from Audubon.org and Andrew Del-Colle.
posted by MonkeyToes at 5:29 PM PST - 6 comments

A University of, by, and for the People, by Sarah Vowell

In 1937, Maurice Hilleman had a job lined up as the assistant manager of the J. C. Penney in Miles City. In Depression-era Montana, Penney’s was top-notch employment, especially to a senior at Custer County High who grew up raising chickens on the outskirts of town. But Hilleman’s older brother pointed out there was that college in Bozeman and suggested Maurice should at least try to get a scholarship. He did, finished first in his class and went on to a graduate program in microbiology at the University of Chicago. Of the 14 standard recommended vaccines — including those for measles, mumps, meningitis, pneumonia and both hepatitis A and B — Hilleman developed eight of them. In a century soaked in genocide, his work saved millions of lives, including, potentially, yours and mine. J. C. Penney’s loss was humanity’s gain.
posted by Stanczyk at 3:13 PM PST - 14 comments

Barnes & Noble reaches its zero-moment point

You may have heard about B&N's recent layoffs and hiring of a new chief merchandising officer in a brief abstract fashion, but you might not realize it marks a point of no return for the company: The entirely unnecessary demise of Barnes & Noble [more inside]
posted by foxfirefey at 12:49 PM PST - 192 comments

I don't even have a whole bike

Nike's new Nothing beats a Londoner ad really showcases the diversity of sporting London, including some familiar figures.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:45 AM PST - 27 comments

Gorilla dating, is it love or science?

Gorilla Match-making There’s no Ok Cupid for gorillas, but a complex science to get the right match!
posted by gryphonlover at 11:09 AM PST - 8 comments

As He Died To Make Men Holy Let Us Die To Make Men Free

Black and Red: a history of the post World War 1 African-American socialist movement [more inside]
posted by The Whelk at 10:25 AM PST - 6 comments

"i see this post more than i see my own family"

"Last Saturday – 12 days ago now – I shared a cringe-worthy video on Facebook: A 6-minute clip of a twenty-something white woman showing off her small, blandly decorated Brooklyn apartment [...] Ever since, this video has been waging a reign of terror over my friends and family, showing up at the top of their feed every single day, over and over and over. They are complaining to me on Facebook. They are complaining to me in real life. They are tweeting me about it and emailing me. Begging me to remove this cursed video that greets them each time they open Facebook.

And of course, they commented on my post. And then people commented on the comments. The more people commented, the more the video showed up on other people's’ feeds. As the rage around this post intensified, so did the comments. Coworkers I sit next to commented. College friends commented. Someone I went to preschool with commented. A vicious, algorithmically delicious cycle."

How I Cracked Facebook’s New Algorithm And Tortured My Friends [Katie Notopoulos, Buzzfeed]
posted by Atom Eyes at 9:47 AM PST - 75 comments

I obviously live for the adrenaline rush, and I love live television

"Twenty years after she shocked the world by winning gold at Nagano, the figure skating prodigy is still an Olympic star, matching and maybe even transcending her prior profile as part of a captivatingly dynamic broadcast team with Johnny Weir." Tara Lipinski Hasn’t Lost Her Edge by Katie Baker at The Ringer
posted by everybody had matching towels at 9:24 AM PST - 14 comments

Music: A Medium for Empathy or Emotional Contagion?

Matthew Guerrieri On Empathy The crimes and misdemeanors language perpetrates against music are many and various, but one offense is more insidious than most, simply for being so insignificant. It’s a preposition. In English, invariably, we listen to a piece of music. Never with a piece of music. [more inside]
posted by gusottertrout at 9:04 AM PST - 7 comments

Fresh politics thread.

ICE cracks down in LA, meanwhile immigration legislation progress isn't looking great. [more inside]
posted by Emmy Rae at 8:54 AM PST - 2607 comments

Lena Dunham on Her Decision to Have a Hysterectomy at 31

Lena Dunham wrote a (characteristically) brutally honest and emotional piece for Vogue about having to have a hysterectomy at 31 as a result of debilitating endometriosis - despite desperately wanting to carry her own children someday. [more inside]
posted by widdershins at 8:32 AM PST - 40 comments

And whatever I am, wherever I am, this is me.

Daleswoman Hannah Hauxwell passed away recently aged 91. She was living alone on her family farm, with no water or electricity, when in 1973 she became famous after being featured in Barry Cockcroft's documentary Too Long a Winter, about the north Pennines community. Her quiet, pragmatic acceptance of her life moved viewers, and donations from the public enabled her to connect her house to the national grid and expand her cattle herd. She went on to feature in several more documentaries, including travelogues to Europe and America, and co-author books. Barry Cockcroft returned in 1989 for a poignant follow up film, A Winter Too Many, as Hannah prepared to sell up the farm she was no longer able to maintain. [more inside]
posted by Helga-woo at 7:19 AM PST - 5 comments

When "see something, say something" fails

Yesterday, a former student opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 and wounding many others. Many people saw it coming but no one did enough to prevent it. What needs to change? [more inside]
posted by Jacqueline at 7:18 AM PST - 1369 comments

Crummy crumb? Try 湯種!

Yudane or yukone, known as tangzhong in Chinese, is a bread baking technique that begins with a water (or milk) roux, heating flour and liquid to 65C to gelatinize the starches. It produces loaves that are tender, springy, moist, and resistant to staling, with a significantly different crumb. Its most famous application is in Hokkaido Milk Bread, but is also useful for bagels, rolls, and any application where a tender crumb or long shelf life is desirable. [more inside]
posted by uncleozzy at 7:04 AM PST - 19 comments

Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Z

Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand: how an extreme libertarian tract predicting the collapse of liberal democracies – written by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father – inspired the likes of Peter Thiel to buy up property across the Pacific. A Guardian long read, by Mark O'Connell. [more inside]
posted by carbide at 2:54 AM PST - 76 comments

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