December 11, 2017

The Coast Guard's 'Floating Guantanamos'

"In an expansion of the war on drugs, the U.S. Coast Guard is targeting low-level smugglers in international waters — shackling them on ships for weeks or even months before arraignment in American courts." (SLNYTM) [more inside]
posted by Chutzler at 9:35 PM PST - 13 comments

Nothing Says Appetizing Like Freeze-Dried Mice Holding Champagne

Competitive tablescaping: it's intense, it's a little weird, and it's growing. [more inside]
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:42 PM PST - 14 comments

Fiery the angels fell

The 10 Best Music Videos of 2017
posted by Artw at 7:21 PM PST - 24 comments

Only one Lucas won an Oscar for Star Wars.

David Welsh breaks down how Star Wars was saved in the editing room during the three months leading up the the release in May 1977. In February of that year, George Lucas had screened a rough cut of his new science fiction epic for some of his closest friends including Brian DePalma and Steven Spielberg. The reviews were bad, very bad. Lucas and his editing team headed by his wife Marsha Lucas went back and massively re-cut for the next ninety or so days to produce a coherent and exciting film from what had been confusing and flat.
posted by octothorpe at 7:05 PM PST - 97 comments

“DDR is now in this renaissance because we can be competitive again,”

The rise, fall and return of Dance Dance Revolution in America [Polygon] ““The lament of the DDR player in America [has always been] you find a machine, you’re just thrilled to play it, and the down arrow just doesn’t work at all,” says Felker, who placed third overall at KAC. “The sensors are just totally busted. You go to the tech and he says ‘Well, it works. It turns on.’ You’re like, ‘That’s not the point.’ I used to tell techs the arrow needs to be cleaned out a bit, and they would take some Windex and spray the top of the panel and wipe it. I’m like ‘dude, that’s not how this works,’ but they don’t want to do any work.”” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:38 PM PST - 24 comments

All Japanese persons, both alien and non-alien

Earlier this year a film curator at the Internet Archive digitized a 16mm color film reel shot by an unknown cameraperson which captured 17 minutes of footage from a concentration camp for Japanese-American citizens in Jerome, Arkansas in June 1944, showing the daily lives of detainees and camp personnel and their families. [more inside]
posted by XMLicious at 2:14 PM PST - 18 comments

Abortion clinic procedure room as sacred space

"I don't put basic reproductive health needs of women beyond the reach of compassion that I derive from my Christianity, whereas other people simply do." In a Radio Boston interview with host Meghna Chakrabarti, Dr. Willie Parker explains how his Christianity called him to help women who need abortions. "Even if I conceded that a fetus is a person on par with the woman carrying it, the problem still remains: How do you give rights to a fetus, to a person that's inside of a person, without taking rights from the person that the person is inside of?" [more inside]
posted by cybercoitus interruptus at 1:03 PM PST - 77 comments

Let's be Wizards!

So you want to be a wizard? (PDF) Julia Evans (aka @b0rk, possibly MeFi’s own?) is a programmer, debugger, ‘zine author, speaker, and prolific blogger. Julia does a great job of pulling back the curtain on how computers work at a lower level than most people (including many in tech!) are familiar with, and by doing so is introducing systems programming to a much wider audience in an enthusiastic and approachable way. [more inside]
posted by yeahwhatever at 11:59 AM PST - 15 comments

Dark lipstick looks amazing until it doesn't

"You’re badly dehydrated and starving, but check out those smoochers! Just…don’t…move and you’ll maintain the hotness. Sure, your friends will eventually notice that you haven’t participated in their conversation for hours, but when they inquire into what’s up with you, strike a sexy, mysterious pose and their concerns will sail out the window." (slReductress) [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 11:06 AM PST - 86 comments

C ya laterrrrr

Dan Hett, whose brother Martyn was killed in the Manchester Arena bombing, has created a hypertext game based on his experience in the aftermath of the attack. [CN: terrorism, death, grief]. [more inside]
posted by threetwentytwo at 9:58 AM PST - 7 comments

Descent Fanzine (5 vols, 1994-1999), by Stephen O'Malley

"DESCENT MAGAZINE was a fanzine published between 1994-1999 by Stephen O'Malley [Sunn O)))], many issues were in great collaboration with Tyler Davis (The Ajna Offensive). You can now download a free PDF portfolio (360mb) compilation of all five issues of DESCENT MAGAZINE. The issues are also individually available for download [on his site]. Please read the notes on each issue as well. There are related goodies on that site as well."
posted by OmieWise at 8:58 AM PST - 3 comments

Cooking with The Onion

Instructional cooking videos are all the rage these days, and the fine folks at The Onion are getting in on the action. Learn how to make a Perfect One-Pot, Six-Pan, 10-Wok, 25-Baking Sheet Dinner. Or How To Sharpen Your Knife With Your Sword. Here's one for How To Make Slow-Cooked Russet Potatoes That Fall Right Off The Bone. Too hard? Can You Hapless Fuckwits At Least Handle An Omelette?
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:41 AM PST - 61 comments

View From 30,000 Feet

View From 30,000 Feet. Airport runways, reinterpreted as minimalist art, drawn to scale. [via mefi projects]
posted by bondcliff at 7:38 AM PST - 16 comments

He takes shots other people haven't even tried before

“Pistol” Pete Maravich vs. George “Iceman” Gervin — H-O-R-S-E
posted by timshel at 6:43 AM PST - 22 comments

You Can Go With This OR You Can Go With That

Among internet-based quizzes, some of the most interesting ask you to decide which of two categories various similar-sounding-or-looking things fit into. John Atkinson's very literate comic Wrong Hands has gotten into it with...
Renaissance Artist OR Coffee?
Greek Philosopher OR Ailment?
Font OR Dog Breed?
and he's not the only one... [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 6:38 AM PST - 22 comments

Obi's Nightmare

Ramón Esono Ebolé is a cartoonist from Equatorial Guinea who has been jailed by the state since September for the publication of a graphic novel satirizing Equatorial Guinea's dictator, Obiang Nguema. "Obi's Nightmare" imagines Obiang forced to live as an ordinary Equatorial Guinean, "A sort of gleefully gross-out Christmas Carol with a serious moral message about the damage corruption had caused." You can read the graphic novel online (and here's an excerpt, translated to English). You can also play Obi's Nightmare, the game! This year, Ebolé was the recipient of the Courage in Cartooning award from the Cartoonists Rights Network International.
posted by ChuraChura at 6:31 AM PST - 2 comments

The Last Aztarac

One of the rarest arcade games out there is a color vector machine from Centuri, one of their few in-house titles, called Aztarac (more info - gameplay video). Designed by Tim Stryker, it was a color vector game and only saw a production run of 500 machines (some say more like 200). It is ultra-rare, and almost no units are known to exist intact. The machine failed in the market and Stryker got out of games, eventually finding success as the creator of the MajorBBS bulletin board software before tragically taking his own life at the age of 41.
This is the story of how Tim Stryker's lost, personal Aztarac machine was found for sale in an ad, and how it was restored.
posted by JHarris at 3:19 AM PST - 38 comments

Johnny Marr & Maxine Peake's The Priest.

Two Manchester greats have teamed up to make a album about homelessness. The Guardian has its excellent first track (The Priest) and a background article that's well worth reading.
posted by Paul Slade at 2:35 AM PST - 6 comments

Extreme tort reform - NZ’s ACC

Would you give up the right to sue for personal injury actions if all of your injury treatment costs, rehabilitation costs, lost wages/salary, and family support were paid for? Tort Reform, Kiwi-Style (Peter H. Schuck, 2008) Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship Series. 1679. [more inside]
posted by Start with Dessert at 1:01 AM PST - 26 comments

You may make it, though LEGO most definitely won't

Why Lego won’t ever make military-related toys. "While you’ll see a lot of spaceships and weaponry like swords or tiny 18th-century muskets, you’ll (sic) definitely won’t ever see military-related Lego toys. Plastic toy soldiers have never gone out of fashion among grade-schoolers, yet adhering to a strict internal policy Lego chose to forfeit some pretty good profits because it doesn’t think war should be seen as child’s play." [more inside]
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 12:47 AM PST - 52 comments

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