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The Australian Government has announced that parents who refuse to vaccinate their children (on the basis of a 'conscientious objection') will no longer have access to key government benefits, including taxpayer funded child care benefits, child care rebates and family tax benefit A. The plan is backed by the Australian Medical Association, and has bipartisan support. More coverage: Sydney Morning Herald. The Australian. Sky News. [more inside]
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 11:34 PM PST - 60 comments

Sunday Candy is a charming new video by Chicago based Chance The Rapper and the Social Experiment.
Previously: 1,2
posted by lkc at 10:10 PM PST - 11 comments

Life is hard when you're a baby sloth. So hard. Behold the injustice. Bonus: hot buttered sloths.
posted by phunniemee at 9:54 PM PST - 23 comments

What if, when Petunia Dursley found a little boy on her front doorstep, she took him in? Not into the cupboard under the stairs, not into a twisted childhood of tarnished worth and neglect–what if she took him in?
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:32 PM PST - 42 comments

Fake argument leads to incredible free-kick
posted by dhruva at 8:21 PM PST - 26 comments

Running your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2 Playing games this way is actually quite economical – especially when comparing to purchasing a full-on gaming rig. Here are the costs you’ll need to consider: GPU Instance runs about $0.11/hr (on a Spot instance, regularly around $0.70/hr) Data transfer will around $0.09/GB, and at a sustained ~10mbit, itll cost you $0.41/hr (4.5GB/hr) This comes out to around $0.52/hr, not bad, for the cost of a $1000 gaming pc, you get ~1900 hours on much higher-end hardware!
posted by CrystalDave at 7:12 PM PST - 46 comments

A prototype of Sound Fantasy, a long-lost Super Nintendo music game by Electroplankton auteur Toshio Iwai, has surfaced online and is now available to download. Sound Fantasy later evolved into the PC program SimTunes.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 6:26 PM PST - 5 comments

Dallas Zoo's Katie the giraffe gives birth -- with the world watching Anyone who has given birth -- or been an observer of the event -- knows how arduous it can be. But to do it live on the Internet? With two hooves sticking out for several minutes in the midst of labor? [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 1:46 PM PST - 10 comments

A Beginner's Guide to Invisibility by Kathryn Schulz: "with invisibility, as with so many forces, what matters is who gets to wield it. If you choose to be invisible, it's a superpower; if it's forced upon you, it's a plight. The same goes for being visible. We typically speak of visibility as an asset—but the subjugated are not always overlooked, and they do not always want to be seen." (via; previously)
posted by kliuless at 12:24 PM PST - 18 comments

As an archivist, my ethical duty is to maintain those objects of intrinsic value to future generations. I’ve often found that others assume my profession is focused on facts and figures, the hard data from which a census or otherwise lifeless historical record can be drawn. Such data will inform one on how a people survived. As important as this data is, it cannot tell you how a people dreamed. [more inside]
posted by byanyothername at 12:23 PM PST - 3 comments

Hillary Rodham Clinton has announced (via a YouTube video and emails to supporters) she is running for the position of nominee on the Democratic Party ticket for the 2016 US Presidential Election. Her campaign website. Will she win the Democratic candidacy? Bookmakers currently say "very likely". And the presidency itself? "50/50". [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 12:20 PM PST - 764 comments

Mad Max: ‘Punk’s Sistine Chapel’ – A Ballardian Primer
posted by Artw at 12:15 PM PST - 30 comments

ImmigrationTrackr - "This project was developed in two hackathons (Code for America and Lesbians Who Tech) to create an open-source tool to help visa and immigration paperwork. The hope is that other people will build on this and make a viable tool for public use. Right now it's mostly developed on Rails." [via mefi projects]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 9:36 AM PST - 30 comments

Sofia Samatar: It’s on the internet (laughter). It calls itself a pan-African writers collective. There’s currently in process an issue on Afro-futures, and I’m one of the guest editors, and it’s exciting to see, because the majority of the writers we’ve received stories about are based in Africa, though there are also some African diaspora writers involved. I think that once we get ourselves in gear and get the issue out, it’s going to be very exciting. I think it’s something that going to be very important as an intervention in the discourse on Afro-futurism, because it’s very much coming from the African perspective.

Pan-African writers collective Jalada has released their second anthology: Jalada 02: Afrofuture(s). [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 8:37 AM PST - 4 comments

Season 5 of Game of Thrones begins Sunday night. Shouldn't you read a recent interview with creator of the books that spawned the show? Yes, you should! [more inside]
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:41 AM PST - 138 comments

"We live in an age of satirical excess. If economists were to diagnose it, they might well call it a comedy bubble. We currently have six late-night talk show hosts, all nattily clad, life-of-the-party, white-guy topical jokers—Conan, Kimmel, Fallon, James Corden, Seth Meyers, and (come September) Colbert—to sum up, and send up, our day for us. We have four comedy news-commentary shows—Maher, Larry Wilmore, John Oliver, and (for a little while longer) Stewart—and fake news from SNL’s Weekend Update, The Onion, ClickHole, and several lesser lights. Vines, viral Funny or Die clips, podcasts, Twitter: each new media platform generates stars of its own, ranging from seasoned comedians to everyday office wits—often, people who have no intention of seeking careers as professional humorists. It would be easy to sniff in condescending high-gatekeeper form and talk of the low signal-to-noise ratio of truly funny people to not, but with 280 million active users on Twitter alone, that still leaves a pretty big signal." [more inside]
posted by josher71 at 6:13 AM PST - 70 comments

It's clear that narrative is an important part of video games and something that the audience deeply relates to. However, the strengths of interactive media are player participation, the ability to experience content in different ways on different playthroughs and the fact that the content is not static. It's time for narrative to deeply embrace these elements.

Ken Levine, of System Shock and BioShock fame, explores player driven replayable narrative gameplay.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 5:35 AM PST - 12 comments

"In the tomb of Princess Isinkheb was found an entire tent – its inside lined with animals and flowers, the blue ceiling studded with appliqued stars..." and the ancient Egyptian craft of tent making is still alive today. Australian filmmaker Kim Beamish spent three years immersed in the lives of craftsmen, filming his documentary The Tentmakers of Cairo, which premieres this April. It also tells the story of Egypt's struggle with democracy through the lives of a community of artisans whose craft has remained largely unchanged since Pharaonic times. [more inside]
posted by fraula at 1:55 AM PST - 10 comments

Favorite of MetaFilter and much of the Internet Neil Cicierega has something new, and it's not a musical mashup - in fact, it's completely silent. It's OUTSLIDE, a tumblr blog where he has curated and collected some of the best - or worst - or best of the worst - presentation slides posted on slideshare.net (previously)
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:05 AM PST - 32 comments

The Brunching Shuttlecocks was (and is) a humor website that ran from 1997 to 2003. It was founded by David Neilsen and Lore Fitzgerald Sjöberg. Neilsen, also known on the site as The Self-Made Critic (which was wonderful), was a funny guy in his own right. But the focus of this post is Lore... who is a Metafilter member btw... twice, in fact. Here's a taste:
Porn Star or My Little Pony?  *  Ratings: Cat Toys ("Catnip Anything: Very entertaining.")  *  I Ought to be a Law (Note: Sjöberg's Law of Lexical Drift.)  *  Ad for PLACEBO^TM ("It Works Because You Want It To.")  *  Ratings: Star Wars Lego Figures  *  An Open Letter From Metallica (Published after Metallica sparked controversy when they sued Napster.)  *  The Björk Song (In RealAudio or MP3, with David Neilsen. Causes insanity.)  *  Pikachewy ("'Twas Beedrill, and the Starmie Gloom/Did Grimer and Gengar in the Mew")  *  Twelve AP Headlines Which Can Be Sung to 'Camptown Races' ("Man in Wheelchair Killed by Train, doo-dah, doo-dah")  *  The Geek Hierarchy: Abridged But Managable - Unabridged but Large - For Printing (PDF) - Frequently Paraphrased Questions (Perhaps the Shuttlecocks' most enduring legacy, you might still find new links to this around the internet.)  *  Roshambo Run (A Flash game. Read the intro, but in essence: lure the rocks, scissors and papers into each other, without getting eaten by them, and get to the coffee cup.) [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 12:01 AM PST - 66 comments