September 26, 2020
A Pilgrimage to Eighty-Eight Places
88Kasyo Junrei (八十八ヶ所巡礼) is a three-piece Japanese rock band. The band’s name refers to a Buddhist pilgrimage that involves visiting eighty-eight temples on the island of Shikoku. Their music videos can be spellbinding but also kind of weird. Their songs deal with afterlife disorientation, the tenuousness of sanity, and, apparently, demons living in a Kowloon arcade. The band has a mascot, o-henro-san, who graces their album covers and appears in one rather trippy video. [more inside]
Bilbies in Sturt National Park
Bilbies have been released into NSW’s Sturt National Park, 100 years after being declared extinct. Video.
We only need each other
In How Can We Pay for Creativity in the Digital Age? (The New Yorker), Hua Hsu reviews William Deresiewicz's new book, The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech (Bookshop). Deresiewicz writes artists “do deserve to get paid for doing something you love, something other people love ... Wanting to get paid does not mean that you’re a capitalist ... It doesn’t even mean that you assent to capitalism. It only means that you live in a capitalist society.” [more inside]
The rest of the church noticed the dog during the Sign of Peace
Three scifi/fantasy stories about surprising connections with animals. "Fetch" by David Moles is a melancholy alt-history about trying to rescue Laika. "St. Ailbe's Hall" by Naomi Kritzer (part 2) portrays a priest overcoming prejudice while figuring out how to deal with a new sentient dog in his congregation. And "The Night Sun" by Zin E. Rocklyn (published this year) is a dark but ultimately triumphant story of a couple's weekend trip to a cabin gone horribly sideways. (Content note for danger or harm to animals in all three stories.)
wltm fat bears
Yes bear lovers, it's that time of year again. Prepare yourselves for Katmai National Park and Preserve's Fat Bear Week 2020! [more inside]
Was It One of the Greatest Spider-Man Stories Ever Told? Hell No.
During this time, you had a lot of new characters that were more “extreme” and “edgy.” Some may disparage them now as really “‘90s” characters, but they were really fresh at the time. Carnage, in particular, is a product of the 1990s, and I think that’s clear due to the violence of the character and because he’s just a more extreme version of Venom, who was already kind of extreme. Carnage was very much a “turned up to 11” kind of character. An Oral History of ‘Spider-Man: Maximum Carnage’ [MEL]
The Most Beautiful Festival in the World
Jurek Owsiak is a Polish radio and TV journalist, a stained glass maker, and a licensed psychotherapist. In 1993, he encouraged his listeners to collect funds for a collapsing pediatric cardiac surgery unit. That project grew into the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity (WOŚP / Wielka Orkiestra Świątecznej Pomocy) which does an annual fund drive. 92% of the money collected goes to purchase medical equipment which provides every diabetic child in Poland with a free insulin pump, funds universal hearing screening for infants/newborns, buys modern medical equipment for struggling hospitals. The second Sunday of January is a day-long nationwide colorful public fundraising holiday with 120,000 volunteers distributing collection boxes, street musicians, and a telethon, culminating in a Grand Finale concert and Light in the Sky laser and fireworks display. In the summer the organization organizes "Polish Woodstock" (YT playlist) as a thank you to all its volunteers.
Who's a good team player? Is it you? Is it you?!
Has your kitty cultivated their core competencies and licked the competition? Do they proactively pounce on priority projects? Are they clawing their way to the top of the corporate ladder, or have you found that their attention to de tail somewhat lacking, and their track record littered with catastrophes and faux paws? Now's the time to let them know, because for Metafilter's fourth September fundraising chatfilter post, janepanic has asked us all to give our cats their yearly Purrformance Review!
Surrounded by giant slabs of cross-laminated timber
Austrian Wood Providing Answer to World's Concrete Problem - "For Austrian timber merchants, who cover about half the world's CLT demand, the material is a bridge linking the digital age to three centuries of forest management begun by Hapsburg Empress Maria Theresia. She saw Austria's forests as a national-security resource and mandated strict sustainability laws." [more inside]
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