April 1, 2017
Do Bears IT in the woods?
A bear is spotted in Montana carrying a laptop. At last we have photographic evidence of the fact that bears have joined humanity in the digital age. We should not be surprised, after all, bears are driving cars and sailing boats.
The 2017 Owl Renesting Season begins!
Every spring for the past four years, a team of volunteers with the Four Lakes Wildlife Center in Dane County, WI renest baby owls who have fallen out of their (often poorly built) homes.
Newspaper article from last year and related photoset.
Facebook albums (read the captions!):
2017 owl renesting season episode #1
and
episode #2
I have no idea how these people got bunnies wedged into cups, or why
Bunnies sleeping and relaxing in cups is one of the strangest trends I've seen in some time. It remains a scientific mystery why bunnies sleep in cups, but with adequate funding, our team of intrepid lapine experts will get to the bottom of this. [Multi-Link Bunny Videos] WARNING: Some bunny videos may contain hamsters.
Here you go, Bobokin
Videogame Dunkey experiments with Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild physics engine (SLYT. NSFW, language.)
Watch Out For Fuzzy!
Yoshi the Dinosaur in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (YouTube link), an unfinished, but still amazing, romhack from 2010 that recently surfaced. [more inside]
Schmooze City: William H. Whyte and "The Social Life of Urban Spaces"
Do you enjoy the city? Vintage documentaries? People-watching and urban planning? The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, William "Holly" Whyte's 1979 documentary, may be right up your alley. It's also available in print (.pdf), and makes for fascinating reading. [more inside]
RIP Gilbert Baker, Gay Betsy Ross
UW campus shooting victim speaks up
Wounded anti-Milo protester speaks. Earlier this year, a Milo Yiannopoulos supporter shot and seriously injured a protester on the University of Washington campus. The victim, "Hex", recently gave an interview on KEXP expounding on why he is not seeking prison time for the shooter and why he prefers dialog and restorative justice over retribution, as well as other things: his medical ordeal and his happiness at marrying his partner while in hospital. Well worth reading. (Audio link; edited transcript) [more inside]
République Amazone
When West African chanteuses including Angelique Kidjo, Nneka, and Mariam Doumbia, form a supergroup, you get Les Amazones d'Afrique. [more inside]
After Article 50
Just four days after the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, Article 50 was officially triggered by Theresa May on Wednesday. Below are a few highlights and lowlights from the first four days after the official Brexit. (Apologies for the Guardian-heavy linking!) [more inside]
“Oh, that’s that goddamn egg thing.”
Cris Shapan has an amazing ability to produce memorabilia which seems authentic. His most devious effort is probably the story of Marlon Brando and Joe Flynn's Eggs. [more inside]
The art of the steal
“...soft power remains an elusive and ill-defined concept,”
Soft Power, National Branding, and the Process of Engineering Attraction (Part 1: Power in International Relations) [Chromatic Aberration Everywhere] “I'’ve been thinking a lot about this type of thing — soft power, how it affects us, how it’s discussed, and what it actually is. And, after a lot of thinking, much discussion (including some with Froggykun!), and lots of writing, I think I’ve finally come up with some answers. Surprisingly, many of them lead back to Outbreak Company — it turns out the scenario the show constructs actually is quite clever on a wide variety of fronts, and could easily be seen as the exact type of critique soft power needs right now (both in content and in form — what better way to criticize the valorizing of otaku culture than as a LN filled to the brim with otaku culture?!) or its exact opposite.” [more inside]
Celebrating April Fools' Day, Slashdot Wears Hacker News' Attire
To Celebrate April Fools' Day, Slashdot Wears Hacker News' Attire Slashdot parodied Hacker News today, turning their site Hacker News-orange and converting the front page into nothing but uber-geeky headlines. The stories include "There's A New New JavaScript Framework", as well as "Someone on Medium Just Said C++ Was Better Than C". And this morning they also posted "OS/2-Based 'Arcanos 5.0' Has Finally Been Releas -- Oh Wait, No It Wasn't. Never Mind".
He likes to move it, move it.
Donald Trump likes to move things around as noticed by Jimmy Kimmel. Also, Trump likes to move it, Business Cat Trump likes to move stuff.
Freeman's Mind 2
How 1,600 People Went Missing from Our Public Lands Without a Trace
When an initial search turns up nothing, who'll keep looking? | When 18-year-old Joe Keller vanished from a dude ranch in Colorado's Rio Grande National Forest, he joined the ranks of those missing on public land. No official tally exists, but their numbers are growing. "I thought that in the wild, someone would send in the National Guard, the Army Rangers, the A-Team, and that they wouldn’t rest until they found you. Now I’m not so sure."
“The optimal method of question delivery is found to be Secret Note”
Armstrong, E. (2017) A Neural Networks Approach to Predicting How Things Might Have Turned Out Had I Mustered the Nerve to Ask Barry Cottonfield to the Junior Prom Back in 1997, arxiv:1703.10449 [q-bio.NC] [more inside]
"Amorphous and inaccurate"
"Nothing Beside Remains: A History of the New Weird" by Jonathan McCalmont: "When popular cultural history tells us that the New Weird was born of lengthy discussions held on the now defunct TTA Press forums in May of 2003, it is tempting to imagine a well-ordered discussion in which a bunch of people hammered out a shared set of sensibilities, identified literary pre-cursors and set a creative agenda that would allow them to promote themselves as a new movement. This is not what happened ..."
Honor to the President!
The most outrageous thing about Donald Trump is that there is no most outrageous thing.
Two weeks ago the Russians featured their pal, President Donald Trump, with his own postage stamp. This is the first time the Russians have ever honored a U.S. president, and while the Russian issued the stamp without explanation, it doesn't take a genius to see what is going on here.
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