November 22, 2017
Native America Calling Talks The First Thanksgiving
National radio program Native America Calling shares the indigenous American peoples' stories [59m, sadly no transcription] about how Thanksgiving originated, rose up in US culture as a holiday, and what it means to them today.
Small beer
Looking for a nice little speakeasy? Next time you're in NYC, check out the fine bars listed in Zagrat. Better go fast before they get too popular--they're already getting some hip press. Hey, it beats visiting a bedbug hotel or falling into a hipster trap.
What does self care mean?
True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from. [more inside]
400yo Map of Nahuatl Lineage in Southern Puebla, Mexico
An interesting mix of Aztec hieroglyphs and Spanish language. This 1593 map shows southern Puebla from the church of Todos Santos (now northeast of Mexico City) and Lake Texcoco, to the church of Santa Cruz Huitziltepec, Pue (lower right). The map also reveals the genealogy and land ownership for the Nahuatl "de Leon" family from 1480 to 1593. Just recently acquired by the U.S. Library of Congress.
These are the times we live in!
UNKNOWN FRUITS FROM THE FURTHEST NATIONS
Forgotten fruit trees:
What the heck is a persimmon? (Fall's best fruit!)
What the heck is a medlar?
What the heck is a quince?
What the heck is a pawpaw?
Some of these need bletting [more inside]
How we fill gaps in our everyday experiences
Instead of taking us out of the real world and drawing us into the artificial virtual space, [Pokémon Go] combines the two; we look at reality and interact with it through the fantasy frame of the digital screen, and this intermediary frame supplements reality with virtual elements which sustain our desire to participate in the game, push us to look for them in a reality which, without this frame, would leave us indifferent. Sound familiar? Of course it does. What the technology of Pokémon Go externalizes is simply the basic mechanism of ideology—at its most basic, ideology is the primordial version of “augmented reality.”Slavoj Žižek unpacks Pokémon Go .
Oh Johnny Planesvalker
The #GoogleTranslatesMTG hashtag highlights Magic: The Gathering (previously) cards that have been run through Google Translate many times before finally arriving back in English. @RosewattaStone is working to post a new one every day. You may prefer to have Desert Bus read the cards out loud to you... well, try to read them, anyway. [more inside]
Spoiler warning: Every film ever made
CinemaSins is a very popular youtube channel whose motto is that "no movie is without sin. We exist mostly just to remind you of that." It is also a youtube channel that is wrong about everything. And I mean it. [more inside]
Not a Christmas Post
Good news, everyone!
Dave Pell (Managing Editor, the Internet) has produced a special edition of his newsletter: the reader-supplied NextDraft Good News Only Pre-Thanksgiving Extravaganza. [more inside]
"an anthropomorphized Ship of Theseus"
While the show is currently halfway through, Land of the Lustrous has already announced itself as a singular vision. The only other show to surpass it this year is David Lynch’s magnum opus Twin Peaks: The Return. But where Lynch rewrites the rules of history and structure, Kyogoku redefines cinematic motion. We are lucky to witness something so bold, so utterly new this year, and nothing looks and feels more unlike anything else than Land of the Lustrous.Carol Grant looks at the beauty and horror of Houseki no Kuni/Land of the Lustrous, a CGI anime show about sentient non-gendered jewel-people fighting off Lunerian invaders who want to harvest their bodies.
Burn each match just so, and arrange in a diamond.
Adam Hillman, an artist from New Jersey, makes colorful geometric art from the arrangement of unremarkable objects.
“The Playstation 4 produced in Brazil cost 4000 reais.”
Brazil's Video Game Gray Markets [YouTube] “Brazil’s video game market is strange. A military dictatorship ruled the country from 1964 to 1985 and enforced strict protectionist economic laws. During the period, Brasília eschewed imports and attempted to manufacture everything it could within its country’s borders. That led to an odd hodgepodge of cloned systems, strange cartridges, and pirated games that are still with the country today. Drew Scanlon of Clothmap recently traveled to Brazil where he explored the strange gray markets that make up the country’s video game culture. He sees a combo Mortal Kombat/ Street Fighter II cartridge made to run on an NES, strange consoles of questionable legality, and learns what happens when the local games store learn the cops are coming to raid the place.” [via: Motherboard] [Previously.]
Brought to you by the Orthopedic Surgeons' Association of Japan
Slippery Stairs is a Japanese game show that delivers exactly what it promises. [SLYT]
KODACHROME KITTIES
Sticky Situation
Please tell me where have all the hobos gone to
Stobe the Hobo, the internet’s most famous train-hopper, dead after apparent accident
James Stobie was the most famous train-hopping hobo on the internet. He rode the rails in a way that was reminiscent of a desperate man searching for work at every city he could find during the Great Depression. Except that Stobie, aka Stobe the Hobo, made YouTube videos about his experiences, hopping trains to move around the country for the pure fun of it.[more inside]
Preaching Integration. Practicing Segregation.
In February, after an investigation by ProPublica, Facebook announced it would be more diligent about prohibiting housing, employment and credit discrimination in ads on its platform. (In the United States, the federal Fair Housing Act (FHA) prevents discrimination based on race, skin color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin.) As a follow-up, ProPublica bought dozens of rental housing ads on Facebook last week, but asked that they not be shown to certain categories of users: African Americans, Muslims, mothers of high school kids, the blind and/or people interested in wheelchair ramps, Jews, people from Puerto Rico, expats from Argentina and Spanish speakers. All are groups protected by the FHA. Every single ad was approved within minutes.
The art, madness and history of holiday centerpieces
As holiday festivities ramp up, you might be wondering "how should I decorate this table? Why should I decorate this table?" To answer both questions, Curbed continues its Period Dramas series with How Christmas decorations evolved through the 1800s in New England. For another look at (New England) Christmas Past, here's Christmas: Williamsburg Style. But wait, you say, let's tackle one holiday at a time. OK, here's the origin of the Thanksgiving cornucopia, and more on the cornucopia in general. If you want a more beachy theme, here's Secret Life of Antiques: Victorian Shell Work. And if you combine all that, you can get a festive garbage clam, just like Ivanka Trump. Holiday centerpiece problem solved!
Ratko Mladic convicted of orchestrating genocide of Bosnian Muslims
Survivors called Mr. Mladic the Butcher of Bosnia. The deadliest year of the campaign was 1992, when 45,000 people died, often in their homes, on the streets or in a string of concentration camps. Others perished in the nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, where snipers and shelling terrorized residents for more than three years, and in the mass executions of 8,000 Muslim men and boys after Mr. Mladic’s forces overran the United Nations-protected enclave of Srebrenica. [more inside]
Travel, Meet People, and Photograph Them
"In 1905, Charles Clayton ("Todd") Webb III was born in Detroit, Michigan. Having been a successful stockbroker in the 1920’s, he lost all of his earnings, and then some, in The Crash. During the Depression, Webb prospected for gold, worked as a forest ranger, and wrote short stories that have gone unpublished. It was during this exploratory period in the 1930s that he first picked up a camera. His interest and love for photography soon crowded out his writing ambitions, and he was able to do the two things he loved the most: travel, meet people, and photograph them."
VVater VVitches
A science blogger asked UK water companies if they still used the ancient 'art' of water divining / dowsing ... and the answer was yes, mostly. Since the story broke the companies have backtracked somewhat - it's not official policy but it still goes on.
Pointy Water
The Icicle Atlas contains more than 230,000 images of icicles (plus 3D models, time lapse movies and time-series data) on 237 icicles made at the University of Toronto over a five year period. [Via Ottawa Citizen] The atlas is the end product of a quest to determine why icicles form ripples.
« Previous day | Next day »