The day in posts: 10/15/2018

October 15, 2018

My what will be at right angles?

A Deep Dive Into Uranus Jokes The search for Uranus Joke Zero, including some history of the 19th century US newspaper industry, the naming of celestial bodies, and the possibly first publication of emoticons.
posted by DyRE at 10:54 PM PST - 26 comments

Bro, be humble

Ferda Girls (HUMBLE. Parody) Ft. Micayla Gatto

More Micayla, riding through her paintings

Interview about women in cycling and more.
posted by Gorgik at 8:49 PM PST - 5 comments

Mr. Ouija and Mrs. Gail

I wasn’t afraid of being possessed, but Gail did freak me out, with stories of Satanic rituals that had taken place in the small Appalachian mountain town I grew up in.
posted by standardasparagus at 8:45 PM PST - 10 comments

"Embodies a sort of can-do attitude that feels commendably not-straight"

As Halloween approaches, a young woman’s fancy turns towards thoughts of spooky things, and also spooky women. Like witches! We can agree that all vampires are bisexual, but are all witches as gay as Willow and Tara led us to hope? We present one theoretical exploration of fictional witches ranked by lesbianism for you to enjoy disagreeing with both in substance and in terms of who was and was not included.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 5:47 PM PST - 51 comments

AniGay is a small group of good friends who love anime and care deeply about the multifaceted, nuanced ways in which it depicts queerness. Over the years, we’ve spent more time than it’s possible to quantify researching, analyzing, and conversing about queerness in anime together, and we’ve become frustrated with the tendency of popular discourse to reduce queerness to binary categories: “representation” (good or bad) and “canon” (yes or no).

Anime? Anigay.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:39 PM PST - 18 comments

House-building robots and 3D-printing concrete buildings

Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) have developed a humanoid robot that can handle a variety of construction tasks when there's either a staffing shortage or serious hazards (Engadget). The prototype uses a mix of environment detection, object recognition and careful movement planning to install drywall by itself -- it can hoist up boards and fasten them with a screwdriver. If you prefer your homes made by a more mechanical-looking machine, here's how to 3D print an 800 square foot (~74.35 square meter) building in a day (Wired + short video from New Story & Icon), though roof, windows, doors and electrical/plumbing are installed with conventional methods.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:00 PM PST - 37 comments

Translating Poetry, Translating Blackness is a 2016 essay by John Keene about the necessity of translating more stories and poems by African and Afro-descendant writers from outside the Anglophone world into English. Recently the Asymptote Podcast devoted two episodes to responding to the essay, first in the summer when host Layla Benitez-James interviewed Lawrence Schimel, focusing on his translation of Trifonia Melibea Obono’s La Bastarda and the issues raised by being a Western, gay, white man translating an African, lesbian, black woman. Benitez-James returned to the subject last week after Keene received a MacArthur Genius Grant, and interviewed him about his essay.
posted by Kattullus at 3:27 AM PST - 2 comments