November 5, 2022
Mother of otherness, eat me.
Keen for some inspiration for next year's Halloween costume? Consider Red, a 2017 short film by artist Del Kathryn Barton with Cate Blanchett as a redback spider who orgasms then eats her mate. Of the aggressive score by Tom Schutzinger, Barton says, "it really comes at you and slaps you around, and the film really needs that.” Yes, yes it does. [more inside]
save mefi btw @ start of the fundraiser it was like a matter of weeks
"I already had a recurring payment to metafilter, so when I saw the casual banner note about fundraising, I initially ignored it. As others have suggested, making the situation more obvious/dire might attract more attention. I've since sent a one-time payment and upped my monthly payment. I'm not saying this to brag, but to stress that it nearly didn't happen due to me initially not realizing the severity of the problem." Anyway I figured that's fixable, so now you know! [more inside]
"You all come out, come out, my dears, to Lavender Country"
Patrick Haggerty, trailblazing gay country singer, 1944-2022.
If you're a longtime MeFite or a longtime public radio listener, you might know Patrick Haggerty from his StoryCorps story about a conversation he had with his dad as a teenager in the 1950s, where his father told him, "don't sneak." [previously, and previouslier.] But Haggerty - in addition to being an organizer, an activist, and a Marxist, who was kicked out of the Peace Corps for being gay - was also widely acclaimed as the first out gay country star as the leader of the band Lavender Country, who as early as 1973 were releasing songs like "Come Out Singing" and "Back in the Closet Again." [more inside]
Hearthstone Closing Down for Some
The Hearthstone Access Project, posted previously, is winding down after a little over a year. [more inside]
Look up McGruff crime tips 39 and 888853 on dril's Twitter
In 2011, Joe Staton and Mike Curtis breathed new life into Dick Tracy. In 2008, dril tweeted the word 'no'. In 2009, he helped breathe life into Weird Twitter. And now, the creator of Daily/Hourly Pornhubbed Heathcliff (content warning: random Pornhub comments) has created Dril Tracy, the Twitter bot that replaces sufficiently long text in Staton/Curtis-era-and-onward Dick Tracy comics with random dril tweets. [more inside]
[it looks better] in the dark, which is a compliment I receive a lot too
"When I started this, I thought this video was going to be like a chill travelog, that was like 30 minutes long, and, uh, it didn't turn out to be that." Jenny Nicholson does a fascinating four hours (almost) on the history and status (as of 2021) of Evermore, a Theme Park/Live Action Role Play experience. [more inside]
The face of the sun, a dying robot, meteor strikes, lovely moons
October 2022 in humanity's exploration of space. Let's start from the sun. The European Space Agency (ESA) Solar Orbiter zoomed very close to our star and captured great images of its corona. [more inside]
Airport Books and the Bad Ideas They Create and Spread
If Books Could Kill is a podcast where Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri discuss and critique books that capture the public imagination. The first episode is about the infamous shitshow Freakonomics, and other staples of airport bookstores will follow in subsequent weeks. It is currently only on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, but the plan is that it will be available everywhere.
the move to onshoring is hypocritical
From the edited discussion (video) on The Geopolitics of Stuff in the inaugural issue of The Polycrisis: The last two years has demonstrated the power of feedback effects—how crises and policy responses magnify each other. Uneven international access to finance for energy worsens climate vulnerability, causing countries to then pay a higher price for debt.
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