November 21, 2017
David Cassidy dies at 67
1970s teen heartthrob David Cassidy of The Partridge Family dies from liver failure [autoplay video]. One of the Partridge Family hits was "I Think I Love You."
When you find a non-toxic channel, hold on to it
One more battle and Mosul will be fully liberated, inshallah
Amazon Australia likely to launch on Black Friday
Black Friday as a commercial concept probably shouldn't have gotten off the ground in Australia, but the rumour mill suggests a hard launch of the local site this Friday. [more inside]
Two days of Bowie-inspired radio programming
Last weekend, NTS and Sonos presented a full weekend of programming celebrating the David Bowie, broadcasting direct from the new Sonos London store on Seven Dials in Covent Garden. Hosts included Dev Hynes, Iggy Pop, Thurston Moore, Connan Mockasin, Neneh Cherry, and many more. The full archive is here; descriptions of individual shows (as provided by the NTS website), with links to each show, follow. [more inside]
'Taches through time
Prehi(p)storic An early history of the ostentatious moustache, a storymap from the Early Celtic Art in Context project.
Once he started, it was all about the stops...
Christopher Herwig is back with more wild architectural wonders: When Christopher Herwig, a Canadian photographer, first embarked on his arduous long-distance cycle from London to St Petersburg back in 2002, the outlandishly designed bus stop was nothing more than a pleasing oddity. What Herwig didn’t expect was that this was only the start of his life-long obsession; there were similarly peculiar roadside shelters scattered across the post-Soviet world. His Soviet Bus Stops Volume II is a new collection of bus stop photos from remote areas of Georgia, Ukraine, and Russia. Herwig previously on Metafilter: A fascinating journey of architectural obsession (also previously and previouslier).
"I’ve been keeping a straight face for thirty-five years."
The Ordovician What?
I do love the Cambrian Explosion but this is just as spectacular. I checked the link to the original publication but it only leads to an abstract so this article is better.
"He cannot say that people want trivia"
CEO of HQ (a live trivia app) to The Daily Beast: If You Run This Profile, We’ll Fire Our Host
[CEO] Yusupov’s objections began with the line, "Scott said that despite the attention, he's still able to walk down the street and order his favorite salad from Sweetgreen without being accosted." "He cannot say that!" Yusupov shouted. "We do not have a brand deal with Sweetgreen! Under no circumstances can he say that." [...] When The Daily Beast read Yusupov a quote from Rogowski saying “I can make people happy and give them the trivia they so desperately love and want. It's been so great to build this community," Yusupov implored the reporter to “take that out.” Asked for clarification, Yusupov replied that Rogowski was absolutely not allowed to say that he "enjoys making people happy and giving them the trivia they want."
A bear, a bat, a pair of legs, never a tiny king from a fairy tale
- But for the actual test – this is the sentence that Rorschachians always repeat – ‘what matters isn’t what you see, but how you see.’ A few ‘content’ answers would later come to be thought significant: ‘food responses’ indicate that a person is ‘unusually dependent’ in relationships; a lot of sexual responses point to schizophrenia. But of more importance is whether an answer is judged to have ‘good form’ – ‘whether it could reasonably be said to describe the actual shape of the blot’ – as determined by Rorschach’s own sense of things, and also by responses from other ‘normal subjects’; he doesn’t say how he determined that those subjects were normal.
How Coral Researchers Are Coping With the Death of Reefs
The drumbeat of devastating news can take its toll on the mental health of people who have devoted their lives to coral. [more inside]
The monarchy that is money
The climate crisis? It’s capitalism, stupid. Benjamin K. Fong ( NYT Opinion) Kim Stanley Robinson: We’ve Come To A Bad Moment And We Must Change, climate change, capitalism, and dystopia.
Playlist: vanguarda paulista
Russ Slater’s vanguarda paulista playlist [After tropicalia ended, the more conservative MPB reigned,] The vanguarda paulista that emerged at the end of the 70s attempted to return to those heady days of tropicália, when it was possible for music to be popular, even as it combined advanced compositional theories with irreverent lyrical ideas and an awareness of mass culture. These same traits characterised the work of the São Paulo based group of musicians and composers who congregated around the small theatre, live venue and record label called the Lira Paulistana.
“FLAWLESS VICTORY!”
25 years ago, Mortal Kombat redefined American video games [Polygon] “What Mortal Kombat lacked in substance, though, it made up for with style. Its characters, digitized from motion capture footage of martial arts actors, looked “realistic” by the standards of the era. Their movements had a choppy quality, and the fighters never looked like they really inhabited their photorealistic settings, but Mortal Kombat’s gory, lifelike gloom gave it a heavy metal album cover feel that set it apart from Street Fighter’s cartoonish fare. Mortal Kombat’s brawlers bled, froze and died in a number of explicit ways ranging from brutal impalement in a pit of spikes to messy dismemberment. Midway’s brawler invested its viscera with a panache that became the game’s main draw.” [YouTube][Mortal Kombat - 25 Year Anniversary Trailer] [more inside]
How colonial violence came home: the ugly truth of the first world war
"But in order to grasp the current homecoming of white supremacism in the west, we need an even deeper history. [...] Such a history would show that the global racial order in the century preceding 1914 was one in which it was entirely natural for “uncivilised” peoples to be exterminated, terrorised, imprisoned, ostracised or radically re-engineered. Moreover, this entrenched system was not something incidental to the first world war, with no connections to the vicious way it was fought or to the brutalisation that made possible the horrors of the Holocaust. Rather, the extreme, lawless and often gratuitous violence of modern imperialism eventually boomeranged on its originators."
Can't help put a smile on my face
A catchy song about dogs to brighten up your Tuesday. (A SLYT from the people who brought you Dump Truck and Cement Mixer. )
The visitor
Interstellar object confirmed to be from another solar system - it's dark red and has organic material - absolutely nothing to worry about [nudity].
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