December 4, 2017
Best TV Shows of 2017
A Generation in Japan Faces a Lonely Death
Every evening around 6 p.m., before retiring for the night, Mrs. Ito closed the paper screen in the window. Then in the morning, after her alarm woke her at 5:40 a.m., she slid the screen back open. “If it’s closed,” Mrs. Ito told her neighbor, “it means I’ve died.”
(Not) The Patron Saint of Finland
In 1956, tired of being hassled by his Irish friends about why the Finns in town didn't have a patron saint to celebrate, Richard Mattson invented one on the spot: St. Urho, whose legend evolved to claim he drove the grasshoppers out of Finland and saved the wine crop, and whose saint's day was celebrated by drinking on March 16 -- right before St. Patrick's Day. His legend has grown and spread across Finnish-American and Finnish-Canadian communities in the upper midwest. [more inside]
Korerotia to reo kia rangona ai tona ataahua
Recent controversies in New Zealand have brought the threatened state of the Māori language back into the spotlight - New Zealand broadcasters refuse to stop using Māori words (Eleanor Ainge Roy, The Guardian) [more inside]
"this terrible thing we're witnessing now is / not unique you know"
Antigonick, a "comic book" of Sophocles' tragedy, is one of Carson's strangest works. It dramatises its own eccentricity, evoking a portrait of the author in a state of distraction; the words of the translation are printed in handwriting (Carson's own), almost entirely without punctuation, in tiny capital letters that are both neat and a little frantic. The illustrations (by the artist Bianca Stone) are a surreal assortment of icy landscapes, domestic interiors, gothic houses, unravelling spools of thread, precarious staircases and drowning horses, which are printed on transparent vellum that overlay the text, and which relate only occasionally to what is happening in the play.Anne Carson's take on Antigone is impressively powerful [more inside]
two great tastes
It's a birdy job, but someone's gotta do it
"In an era of tight budgets, why don’t we just drag deer off to the side of the road—far enough away so that scavengers don’t become roadkill themselves—and then let the scavengers and decomposers provide their clean-up services for free? Why do we dedicate so much time, money, and sheer physical exertion to transforming carrion into trash?" Jonathan L. Clark, for Discard Studies: Consider the Vulture: An Ethical Approach to Roadkill. (Includes photos of roadkill). [more inside]
Boomhauer Drums
He came dancing across the water
Neil Young Archives (registration, but no credit card/payment method, required) is a high-quality archive of Neil's entire back catalog, accessible for free until June 30 (via OpenCulture) [more inside]
“Nodes represent dynasties and vertices represent a killing...”
Crusader Kings 2 player records 700-year NPC game to find who gets “most kills” and “most children”. [Rock Paper Shotgun] “Royal incompetence simulator Crusader Kings 2 is one of the best games ever. Over hundreds of years, sultans and kings create new empires and murder their families. Today a data science man gets in touch to say he recorded a 700-year game in ‘observation’ mode, pulled out all the data like a big reel of cassette tape, shoved it through some kind of magical process I won’t pretend to understand, and came up with statistics on several rulers. This also resulted in detailed “networks” of kills and marriages. The important thing is: this lets us see who had the most babies. James Nagle is a data scientist. He’s previously mapped relationships between figureheads of the Easter Rising in Ireland using documents from the National Archive. This time, he dived into CK II, writing a script to pull out all personal data about the thousands of in-game characters – births, deaths, marital status, etc. Basically it was like doing a giant census for 691 years in a row. He’s since done a write-up of his project and produced various visualisations of the data.”
The Situationist Guide to Parenting and other Books of the Year
It's that time of year of top-10 lists, and if you're behind on reading, you might want to catch up with this list by Darran Anderson writing for literary website 3:AM Magazine, which includes such titles as Reclaimed Territory: A post-Brexit Britain Household Companion, The Situationist Guide to Parenting, and The Russian Bot’s Wife, and other books you will never have to worry about not having time to read because they don't actually exist.
Ow My Balls
Hot Ones is a Youtube series where people eat sequentially hotter wings while doing interviews. See Neil deGrasse Tyson get his comeuppance. Watch Terry Crews cry. There is something for everyone (all previous links are to Youtube). (Wikipedia about show for those who don't want to/can't watch videos)
MULTI-TRACK DRIFTING!!
Thomas the Tank Engine Train Stunts. The first couple stunts are a little ho-hum, but then it...*sunglasses*...goes off the rails.
I'm-a teach you how to make lasagna
How Dollar General Became Rural America's Store of Choice
The more the rural U.S. struggles, company officials said, the more places Dollar General has found to prosper. “The economy is continuing to create more of our core customer,” Chief Executive Todd Vasos said in an interview. [Alternate link] [more inside]
Sad news for MilSF fans
The Untold Story of Japan’s First People
“That didn’t work.”
The Pontiac Silverdome, once home to the Detroit Lions - and Wrestlemania III (previously) - has been in a state of decay ever since its closure. On Sunday, an attempt to demolish it with explosives failed, prompting a range of hot takes and Detroit Lions-related jokes. The Pontiac Silverdome previously: 1, 2. [more inside]
What is money, anyway?
How bitcoins became worth $10,000 $11,317
Bitcoin Is a Delusion That Could Conquer the World
You Don’t Understand Bitcoin Because You Think Money Is Real [more inside]
Bitcoin Is a Delusion That Could Conquer the World
You Don’t Understand Bitcoin Because You Think Money Is Real [more inside]
Zero Context Theater presents...
This is just to say
Now We Have a Competition!
Top 25 Films of 2017: a perfectly edited video montage of David Ehrlich's annual favorites (SLVimeo). Via kottke.
To be fair, both ends look alike
'My mum had a go on the VR and was so scared she grabbed the wrong end of the dog.' 😂🐶 (SL twitter video)
Have You Seen This Fabric?
Since 1999, Missing Fabrics has offered a free*, crowd-sourced service for locating hard-to-find fabrics for quilters, upholsterers, and other crafters who need just a little more fabric in order to complete a project. It is also a glorious example of early web design and community. [more inside]
Imbécile, Warren est MORT!
In Parc Pie-XII in Montreal there is a natural cavern, the Cavernicole Cave or St.-Léonard Cavern. It was discovered early in the nineteenth century and its most famous moment was as a hiding place for weapons and patriotes during the 1837 Rebellion in Lower Canada. After being largely forgotten for many years, the cave was turned into a historical tourist attraction. some forty years ago.
Earlier this year, two cavers from la Société québécoise de spéléologie, Daniel Caron and Luc Le Blanc, sent a small camera through a hole in a limestone wall in the cavern to verify suspicions that there was another section and discovered a far larger cavern hidden below the streets of Montreal. [more inside]
Finnish Tango is Serious Business
A 10-year-old 60 Minutes story on Finnish tango (terrible sound quality). Fascinating. I remember seeing this and, as a dancer myself, was riveted by the national character versus the dance and its origin. Morley Safer (I think) talks with local Finnish celebrities about insight to local mores.
Here is a list of 67 videos of Finnish tango, some classical, some instrumental, all interesting. popular Finn tangos. The first video seems to be about Argentine musicians going to Finland to play tango.
And just for fun, I found this video by Frank Zappa: Satumaa performed live in Helsinki 1974.
Glitch Forever Wiki
Glitch Forever Wiki [via mefi projects] I have, with some help, revived the Glitch Strategy Wiki for the long-gone and much-mourned MMO, Glitch.
The wiki was rebuilt from an older archive augmented with a lot of copy-pasting from Wayback pages. It will serve as a resource for gamers in Eleven alpha and hopefully Children of Ur revival projects, along with various other spinoff creations, or for those who just want to revel in nostalgia.
Moonlight, slanting through the window, became a white pattern...
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