March 4, 2018
for the slightly more ~mature~ YA reader,
Sunday Evening Cartoons
Sam Henderson's "Magic Whistle" blog usually highlights scans of comic books, newspaper comics and magazine cartoons (with a content warning for girlie magazine content), but on the weekend he gets animated with the Rainy Day Sunshine Fun-Time Sunday Low-Res Cartoon Show. The collected cartoons each week usually vary widely in age, familiarity and quality, but this week's group are all considered excellent by one standard; they've all won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. [more inside]
How are Marxism and Science Fiction related?
Cory Doctorow, Michael Swanwick, Kim Stanley Robinson, Marge Piercy, Ken Macleod, Mark Bould, and Natalia Theodoridou start from here:
The central conceit of this issue of Big Echo is that Capital is a science fictional text. If you have any immediate thoughts on that (good idea, bad idea, obvious idea, stupid idea) we’d love to know them.[more inside]
T’Challa: Too much math, Shuri. Just show me the damn players.
Five Women
"Five Women" from Chana Joffe-Walt and 'This American Life.' Vivian, Deanna, Onnesha, Kristen and Tana tell their stories – how their lives intersected with disgraced former editor of Alternet, Don Hazen, and how their earlier experiences shaped their perspective. This is an amazing story, riveting and terrible, and I'm so grateful to these women for opening up the way that they did, including Hazen's current wife, Vivian. [more inside]
The Black, Feminist Magic of "Living Single"
Running for five seasons from 1993 to 1998, Living Single is one of the most celebrated sitcoms in African-American TV history, ranking among the top five in African-American ratings throughout its run. Featuring the adventures of six young Black professionals (two men, four women--but especially the women!) and their lives together in two units of a Brooklyn brownstone, Living Single heralded a flurry of sitcoms centering young, free, and single roommates figuring out life and love in the big city. 20 years after the series finale, Living Single's cast and creator reflect on the show's run... and there may be a revival in the works!
Three girls, a dead raccoon and a crockpot
Found a dead... something... in the woods? Here's how you and your budding zooarchaeologists can clean up the skeleton.
Need some help with identification? John Rochester on Flickr has hundreds of photos (may be a northern Europe focus)
Rock, star
After the discovery of seven Earth-like planets orbiting TRAPPIST-1 (a dwarf star 40 light years from us) in 2016 and 2017, the scientists studying the planetary system couldn't create a model of it that didn't quickly collapse until they took into account certain data about the way the system was formed. The orbital resonance of the system got others wondering what it would sound like if we could hear it. This was when "an astrophysicist, a musician, and an astrophysicist/musician decided to explore what happens when the rhythms and harmonies of astronomical systems are translated into music so they can be heard by human ears." [more inside]
I'm not on a diet, I'm fasting.
My smartwatch constantly measures my blood sugar by sending tiny electric shocks to my ear. [more inside]
The beat goes on
In this computer animated short, the space-rock duo DEATH VAN tours through a miniature world inhabited by surreal creatures that are haunted by a menacing and mischievous entity.
"I find it impossible to be just a little bit outrageous.”
Cynthia Heimel, columnist who brought humor to hanky-panky, dies at 70 (Washington Post) "Cynthia Heimel, a humor columnist whose biting, ribald commentary on sex, romance and late-century womanhood were collected in books including “Sex Tips for Girls” and “Get Your Tongue out of My Mouth, I’m Kissing You Good-Bye,” died Feb. 25 at an assisted-living community in Los Angeles. She was 70. The cause was complications from dementia, said her son Brodie Ransom. Ms. Heimel had been diagnosed about a year ago." [more inside]
“A cornered fox is more dangerous than a jackal!”
Can Metal Gear Survive without Hideo Kojima? [The Guardian] “Former Konami game director Hideo Kojima may be one of the most famous faces in video gaming. Not least because he puts himself in his games, a la Hitchcock, which for nearly the past three decades have been mostly Metal Gear titles. 2015’s MGSV: The Phantom Pain was a spectacular finale that offered real-life fireworks too, as Kojima and Konami acrimoniously parted ways. This breakup saw a reaction along tribal lines, with the fanbase generally siding with Kojima and blaming Konami. Something of the hangover remains in the reaction to Metal Gear Survive [YouTube][Game Trailer], which is a “divergent take” on Metal Gear in the studio’s own words. It transplants the series into another dimension for an online co-op game for up to four players – with, and it’s hard to suppress a slight sigh here, zombie-type enemies.” [more inside]
From the dark companion of Algol...
The Bard of Auburn: Getting Weird in the Long Valley - The Los Angeles Review of Books on horror writer and artist Clark Ashton Smith (previous)
4 minutes
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