November 16, 2015
"No one wants a fart-themed surprise sneaking up on her."
"Not everyone is so shy about queefing. Some people are downright enthusiastic about it. How else can we explain things like queef fetish forums, queef championships and queef-themed pornography? In her 2013 song, 'Queef,' Awkwafina incorporates the proud line, 'You need to embrace your queefing. You can’t be scared of it anymore. It’s gonna save the world.'" Queefing: How to Get Down with Sexual Embarrassment (By Carrie Weisman / AlterNet) [previously and relatedly]
“When was the last time you cried?”
would you like to be an intern at your local community radio station?
It is your first day as an Intern at the Night Vale Community Radio Station. You know it may be your last. But the show can’t proceed as normal until you recapture The News. [more inside]
Decoding Daesh
Why is the new name for ISIS so hard to understand? And why it's a really good idea to start exclusively using this new name instead of any of the other ones.
...like Xerxes whipping the sea for swallowing his shitty bridge.
Marcin Wichary writes (among other things) articles about crazy, complicated computer bugs and what they say about the world. Come to read about how a bug in Google's famous Pac-Man doodle led to all manner of chaos, stay to learn how a confluence of history, typography, and OS weirdness broke the Polish S (previously), or how a fluke of CSS unearthed a decades-old font. [more inside]
Katherine Johnson and others awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom
President Obama: “I look forward to presenting these 17 distinguished Americans with our nation’s highest civilian honor. From public servants who helped us meet defining challenges of our time to artists who expanded our imaginations, from leaders who have made our union more perfect to athletes who have inspired millions of fans, these men and women have enriched our lives and helped define our shared experience as Americans.” [more inside]
The tweets and listicles of outrageous fortune.
“...that unique Nintendo brand of faux progressivism.”
Nintendo still won't make Link a girl, but they'll put him in a dress and call him 'Linkle'. [Kill Screen]
There's is no conceivable lore reason for why Link can't be reincarnated as a girl. As the Zelda Wiki states, Link is, "the name shared by the main protagonists of The Legend of Zelda series." There are many different reincarnations and iterations of the Link character, "each possessing the Spirit of the Hero, with some of them being blood related as well," but, most importantly, all Links are connected by the fact that they were "chosen by the Goddesses to protect the land from evil whenever deemed necessary."[more inside]
Basically, a chance to get wasted dancing feverishly
The Guča Tumpet Festival, also known as Драгачевски сабор, is an annual brass band festival held in the town of Guča, in western Serbia. [more inside]
Can social networks substitute for peer review in science?
This year, the scientific workshop ADAPT shakes the status quo in the scientific process by using reddit as its primary review system. [more inside]
Football is a country
The Stade de France–A History in Fragments
Or did he, and the other players, make the same decision that many are now saying we should: that in the face of horror the only thing to do is to keep playing, moving, living? Watching it now – knowing all that we do about what happened Friday night in Paris – we can perhaps count it as one of the most surreal things to ever take place in this storied stadium, a place built nearly two decades ago specifically to house history.
The Time Republicans Helped Build an All-Black Town Called 'Soul City'
Brentin Mock explores the rise and fall of Soul City, a planned city in rural Warren County, North Carolina founded by civil rights veteran Floyd McKissick and funded by the Nixon administration, and how Soul City's decline propelled the environmental justice movement.
“the best for nervous flyers”
“I’m 60% excited,” says Adele, directing me to a couch beside a set of speakers, “40% shitting it.” She’s invited me here today to hear her third album, 25.
Taser, body cameras, money and politics
Whichever cameras are used, it’s increasingly clear police will control the footage. In a recent survey of 25 departments with body camera programs, only two made the footage available to individuals filing complaints against the department, and only four had systems to prevent tampering or unauthorized access. - Who controls the cop cam?
I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky...
Vancouver band North Atlantic Explorers with their dreamy beautiful odes to a life lived on the sea. [more inside]
Say "Hwæt!".
Interested in foreign languages and language history? As requested, here's a (highly subjective) selection of podcasts and blogs to keep you busy. [more inside]
"I wanted to go to Heaven.”
[Megan] Phelps-Roper spent the summer and the fall in an existential spiral. She would conclude that everything about Westboro’s doctrine was wrong, only to be seized with terror that these thoughts were a test from God, and she was failing. “You literally feel insane,” she said. Eventually, her doubts won out. “I just couldn’t keep up the charade,” she said. “I couldn’t bring myself to do the things we were doing and say the things we were saying.” - How a prized daughter of the Westboro Baptist Church came to question its beliefs. (content warning : extreme homophobic & anti-Semitic language)
Dominicans speak only one word. And it is all of the words.
"I don't know. It never really made sense to me."
ESPN uses the "30 for 30" series to tackle the most important sporting event of the Cold War. [more inside]
Their boss would sooner name a dead man than any living woman.
On Gawker's Problem with Women. A former staff writer describes how a media company founded on whistleblowing and radical transparency failed its female employees.
The Seduction of Safety, on Campus and Beyond
When it comes to human resilience, our culture has grand ideas about the nobility of hardship and suffering. “The world breaks every one, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places,” Ernest Hemingway wrote. And certainly, I became the woman I am today, for better and worse, because of the hardships I have endured. If I had to choose, though, I would prefer to have not lost my sense of safety in the way I did.--Roxane Gay on Safe Spaces
Then he handed me a bag full of money
"The Memphis Grizzlies will be honoring the old Memphis Sounds for their Hardwood Classic games this NBA season by wearing the Sounds’ red-and-white jerseys. Given that the Sounds were around in the early 1970s and were of the ABA, the jerseys are pretty slick and sweet. ...To understand the Sounds you need to understand the music. And to understand the music you need to understand race and cotton." - Curtis Harris on Stax Records and the context of the Memphis Sounds.
The strange tale of a Cities: Skylines town with only one house
In Cities: Skylines ... it can be hard to keep tabs on a single person's life for very long, and difficult to find them again later. I thought I'd fix this problem by creating a city in which only a single home could be built. Then I'd see who moved in and keep track of their lives. Here's what happened.[more inside]
Genegineering
Humans 2.0 - "With CRISPR, scientists can change, delete, and replace genes in any animal, including us. Working mostly with mice, researchers have already deployed the tool to correct the genetic errors responsible for sickle-cell anemia, muscular dystrophy, and the fundamental defect associated with cystic fibrosis. One group has replaced a mutation that causes cataracts; another has destroyed receptors that H.I.V. uses to infiltrate our immune system." [more inside]
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