December 5, 2019
Top-Selling Singles by Decade, 14,500s BCE - 2010s CE
Archie Henderson is a musical historian. In this twitter thread, working with Adrian Gray, he lists top-selling singles of selected decades starting with the 2010s and going back from there. Way back.
aiDungeon.2
Hey, what happens if you use the GPT2 text generator as a dungeon master/zorkbot? Only one way to find out! [more inside]
A little bit of work and a whole lot of love
Hair Love, a short film about a father learning to do his daughter's hair for the first time. (SLYT)
All I Want For Christmas Is Another List To Argue About
The 50 greatest Christmas songs – ranked! (SLGuardian) What it says on the tin - unfortunately not a lot of links to versions of the songs, so you might have to do some searching to figure out exactly how Wrong this list is . . .
The Deep Sea
Never work for your dream brand. It'll kill you.
She can reach the pedals a little better now
Pickleball: it's a Big Dill.
Though it started as a home-made game to entertain bored kids (YouTube), Pickleball has grown to be an internationally played sport (USAPA history), and this year marks a decade of the USA Pickleball National Championships. Despite the effort to (again) make the sport appeal to younger players (Wilson), Money's profile on the sport opens with the question: Are You Really Retired If You Don't Play Pickleball? [more inside]
🍅 — are all those materials worth 0.32 ounces of fry dip?
I’m Upset: Do not give me ketchup packets [The Outline] “Plastic cutlery, straws, napkins — these accompaniments are assumed to be necessary for eating a delivered meal. But when you don’t end up using these items, they pile up, leaving you with a collection of utensils and single-serving condiments that’s one motivated chore day from being actual trash. One member of this collection is more bothersome than the rest, however: the ketchup packet. At the moment, I have three ketchup packets nestled in a bowl, containing pens and other items on my kitchen table. Will I ever use them? No, because they’re aggravating and useless. The alleged purpose of a ketchup packet is to complement fries or whatever else you ordered that might be close enough to a food that goes well with ketchup. I am brave enough to say it: the ketchup packet is gross. [...] In addition to being annoying, ketchup packets are unsustainable —” [more inside]
Give a Sh*t for Science!
If you don't need a reason to send photos of your poop to strangers, skip the article and go to seed.com/poop on your phone to upload a photo of your best bathroom work - for Science!
Snoopy doesn't sing anymore.
The original print vs. the subsequent edition of "A Charlie Brown Christmas." (SLYT) For all you lovers of Peanuts, classic animation, Christmas, goof nerdery, and of course the special itself. (A huge Venn diagram on Metafilter, I'm guessing.) Check out Sally's hearts! (The special previously)
the only T-shirt that outsold Cats was the Hard Rock Café’s
How Cats Changed Broadway (Now and) Forever. By the time Cats opened at the Winter Garden on October 7, 1982, it had a record-breaking advance sale of $6.2 million. Predictably, the reviews were mixed. Michael Feingold, in the Village Voice, wrote, “To sit through [the show] is to realize that something has just peed on your pants leg.” Frank Rich, in the New York Times, said the show was full of banalities and catnap stretches of boredom, but praised its “theatrical magic” and accurately predicted it would “lurk around Broadway for a long time to come.” [more inside]
D.C. Fontana, 1939-2019 🖖
Dorothy "D.C." Fontana, most famous as a writer for The Original Series, has died. Starting as a writer in an era when it was typical for women to use initials to hide their gender, she became a story editor on The Original Series, wrote several classic episodes, and helped shape many more. She then went on to write for many other shows, including 3 Star Trek spinoffs. She also taught and mentored aspiring screenwriters, and served on the Writers Guild of America's Board of Directors. A true trailblazer.
Anthony Hopkins Talks to Brad Pitt
What Does Collective Ownership and Universalism Look Like?
“ In an institutional setting, the socialist ethos is represented by the idea of common ownership, that powerful institutions should be owned and controlled by those with a stake in them. Michael Walzer expresses this principle in the form of a classic maxim: “what touches all should be decided by all.” How To Build Socialist Institutions “ The leftist vision for how institutions should operate frequently involves taking money out of the picture, not just because we find it grubby but because it gets in the way of what we really want out of life. ” The Importance Of Making Everything Easier : Why universal access is good and means testing is terrible. (Current Affairs)
Baboon High School
How Living With Baboons Prepared Me for Living Through High School. "The world of mean girls and cliques was a startling change from working alongside my primatologist parents. Fortunately, I’d learned a bit about navigating vicious social structures." [more inside]
This Peloton commercial needs to calm down
As a new commercial from Peloton makes clear, one of the best ways to accomplish this goal is to give your loved ones stationary bikes that hold them hostage for at least a year of anxiety-soaked daily exercise. A darkly hilarious new commercial makes a Peloton bike seem less like a Christmas present and more like a nightmare. [more inside]
Boxes of magic
Kagen Sound (formerly Schaefer) is a full-time artist known for his complex secret opening boxes. His website. (Previously on Metafilter)
Howard Cruse, RIP
He was a major gay (and underground) cartoonist. "Howard Cruse, a pioneer of LGBTQ comics who served as the founding editor of Gay Comix — one of the first series to feature work by and for openly gay men and women — and who later published “Stuck Rubber Baby,” an acclaimed graphic novel inspired by his early years in Jim Crow-era Alabama, died Nov. 26 at a hospital in Pittsfield, Mass. He was 75." Previously
Brölk != mjölk
Pachelbel's Train
« Previous day | Next day »