April 26, 2018
“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 Offerman ✍ Bill Hader ✍ Adam Scott ✍ Abbi Jacobson and Zach Woods
Other comedians who have taken a crack at captioning on camera: Nick Offerman ✍ Bill Hader ✍ Adam Scott ✍ Abbi Jacobson and Zach Woods
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]
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]
I was told we would be fighting MEN!
Overwatch vs TF2 (SLYT)
Outside-the-blocks thinking
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.
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.
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]
'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
"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]
“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]
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.
"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.
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."
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]
Bill Cosby found guilty of sexual assault
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.
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).
The latest from the ProPublica project Documenting Hate. (previously).
Trees are political too.
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]
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]
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..."
"Being a delivery worker is the lowest rung of work in society"
"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]
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]
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]
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.
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]
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