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Tiny Jyn Erso cosplayer hands out Death Star plans to Leia Cosplayers at Star Wars Celebration.
posted by Artw at 10:48 PM PST - 26 comments

For your listening pleasure, here are two rather different producers of beat-driven music on Bandcamp: Mexico City-based, jungle/electronic master-mangler, priestess of chaotic drum & bass, formerly known as Smurphy [Soundcloud, NSFW header image], now Upgrayedd Smurphy. If that's too chaotic in a random sort of way, Canterbury-based sound-twister (Facebook video) an energetic beat manipulator making glitch-hop with appreciation of old IDM masters a la Four Tet or Aphex Twin.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:19 PM PST - 8 comments

Tracey Griesbaum was fired from her job as women's field hockey coach at the University of Iowa due to complaints of being overly harsh to her players in practice. Her significant other Jane Meyer was senior associate athletic director; as events progressed, she was eventually fired as well. Both are now suing the State of Iowa, the University of Iowa, and Iowa Board of Regents. Meyer's trial got underway this week and Griesbaum will have her day in court later this summer. And there's more. Members of the field hockey team filed a Title IX complaint for the exact opposite reason their coach was fired, they want to be treated like their male counterparts and get yelled at.
posted by Fukiyama at 5:45 PM PST - 22 comments

While Kompakt records co-founder Wolfgang Voigt has hundreds of releases to his pseudonyms, its likely his 1997-2000 ambient/techno project GAS that has had the most influence. Critics took last year’s vinyl reissue of four albums (Zauberberg, Königsforst, Pop, and the long-missed Oktember 12”) as an opportunity to lavish praise: The Quietus, Spectrum Culture, Pitchfork, Resident Advisor. Recently, Boiler Room’s Music Editor Gabreil Szatan interviewed Voigt about the project.
Today, Voigt released the first new GAS album in seventeen years: Narkopop. Early reviews are in from NPR, Pitchfork, The A.V. Club, and Line of Best Fit.
posted by Going To Maine at 5:31 PM PST - 10 comments

Sexual Abuse at Choate Went On for Decades, School Acknowledges "Choate Rosemary Hall, the elite Connecticut boarding school, said on Thursday that at least 12 former teachers had sexually molested — and, in at least one case, raped — students in a pattern of abuse dating to the 1960s." [more inside]
posted by A. Davey at 2:29 PM PST - 33 comments

How liberals fell in love with The West Wing.
posted by R.F.Simpson at 2:01 PM PST - 54 comments

Sheep, panthers, seals, cats, puffer fish, dogs, sloths, elephants, donkeys, pelicans, monkeys, pigeons, cows — and so many more — are just some of the animals who like cameras or are at least camera-curious at Ready for My Nose Up
posted by terrapin at 1:43 PM PST - 14 comments

David Kessler spent six years filming the Pine Barrens’ landscape and its inhabitants, capturing the area in every imaginable state and season.
posted by bq at 1:21 PM PST - 25 comments

In the University of Michigan library, they have the most dangerous book in the world: Shadows from the Walls of Death. Eighty-six pages long, it has no words.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 1:18 PM PST - 31 comments

An interactive oscilloscope emulator, by thing-maker Neil Thapen.
posted by cortex at 1:05 PM PST - 10 comments

The classic "Silence of the Lambs" trailer recut as a romantic comedy. (SLYT)
posted by cozenedindigo at 12:28 PM PST - 18 comments

Friday fiction: Symbols and Signs by Vladimir Nabokov. In a letter to Katharine A. White, The New Yorker’s fiction editor at the time, Nabokov said that “a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one.” What that story is, he never specified. Enjoy it for its graceful evocation of everyday life, of the struggle to find footing amidst loss and for the mysterious chill of its ending. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 12:13 PM PST - 9 comments

Meine Meinung is a jazz combo out of Japan that posts and streams a lot of their sessions on Youtube, frequently interpreting classics of videogame music. (You can click this one before going to the inside, it's exciting!!!! (Chrono Trigger theme)) [more inside]
posted by grobstein at 12:01 PM PST - 11 comments

Tarantulas measure distance with their lateral eyes The species doesn't retrace its steps. Instead, it calculates its two-dimensional movements as if they were the sides of a right-angle triangle. The hypotenuse of the hypothetical triangle guides the spider home.
posted by Michele in California at 11:56 AM PST - 10 comments

‘The X-Files’ Will Return [The New York Times] “The truth is out there, and soon, new episodes of “The X-Files” will be, too. Fox announced late on Thursday that 10 more episodes of the show, about two F.B.I. agents who gravitate toward the unexplained, would air in the 2017-18 television season. Production is set to begin this summer. Fox did not announce details of the show’s plot but said that its two stars, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, who play the agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, would appear.”
posted by Fizz at 11:52 AM PST - 62 comments

I didn't want a parrot. (or - How I went from 200oz of beer nightly to 2 pints.)
posted by showbiz_liz at 11:26 AM PST - 36 comments

"After thinking about it a bit more, I realized that, for many, this wasn't an inherent fact. Bugs Bunny is a rabbit, and while he is anthropomorphic, the suspension of disbelief only stretches so far for some people. It might not be a widely held understanding for white people, so immediately after talking to my friend about Bugs Bunny being black, I turned to my (admittedly, mostly white) colleagues and asked around. "Do you think Bugs Bunny is black?" I asked, only for many to not really understand the question." [more inside]
posted by palindromic at 11:22 AM PST - 126 comments

A summary of 60+ studies shows that, while exercise is good for your health in many ways, you shouldn't exercise to lose weight.
posted by chrchr at 11:16 AM PST - 30 comments

Following an evening of repeated appeals, Arkansas officials proceeded with their first execution in 12 years. Ledell Lee, on death row for over two decades, was declared dead this Thursday at 11:56 PM. His death warrant was set to expire 4 minutes later. AR Governor Asa Hutchinson is rushing to execute 8 men before April ends and the state's midazolam supply expires. The lethal cocktail reportedly also included one drug acquired under false pretenses and another "donated" by a mystery supplier in a parking lot. Justice Neil Gorsuch sided with the conservative majority in denying a stay—his first recorded vote. [more inside]
posted by cichlid ceilidh at 10:47 AM PST - 45 comments

Girl Scout Troop 6000's home is a former Sleep Inn in Queens, New York, that now accommodates homeless families. The troop's more than 20 members come from the families who live there, and costs are covered by the Girl Scouts of Greater New York. (main link from NYT; the Today Show also covered it)
posted by Etrigan at 10:29 AM PST - 14 comments

The Buena Vista Hypothesis: the ancient creatures who first crawled onto land may have been lured by the informational benefit that comes from seeing through air.
posted by Rumple at 9:42 AM PST - 3 comments

From a review of As Much as I Can: 'We peer through face-sized holes into a room where, one after another, two diagnoses are delivered to two men: one HIV negative, the other positive. We press to walls listening to the exhausted, anguished 12-step testimony of a community mentor. We eavesdrop on a Greek chorus of homophobes at a barber shop. We hear a mom worry that her son will be shot for walking, driving, living, while black. "You can't run away; you can't clock out of that experience," Isa (an audience member) said, "because you're also never in a room long enough to get stuck."' [more inside]
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 9:42 AM PST - 2 comments

In their efforts to cure what they see as a moral crisis infecting our nation, the anti-choice movement has historically thrown their power, money, and influence behind their two favorite antidotes to abortion: abstinence-only education and adoption. In any era when reproductive rights are being rolled back, as they are now, feminists need to get stronger and clearer about where we stand and what we’re fighting for. We all know, both from data and from common sense, that abstinence education is not only a failure but wildly detrimental to the health and safety of young people. But there doesn’t yet seem to be a broader understanding, even in the mainstream feminist and pro-choice movements, that promoting adoption has its problems too.
posted by Blasdelb at 9:12 AM PST - 43 comments

Previously in the 2017 French presidential election: It was looking like the top two winners in the first round this Sunday would be Emmanuel Macron (of the centrist one-man party Forward!) and Marine Le Pen (of the far-right National Front), with François Fillon (of the center-right Republicans) lagging in third. Macron was then expected to win easily over Le Pen in the runoff. But a funny thing happened on the way to the Elysée: Jean-Luc Mélenchon, of the far-left France Unbowed (and star of the video game Fiscal Kombat), has surged to tie Fillon for third place in most polls, as support for Benoît Hamon (of the center-left Socialist Party) has collapsed. Macron and Le Pen are still expected to make it to the runoff, but the possibility of either Mélenchon or even Fillon upsetting that outcome can't be dismissed. And with ISIS claiming responsibility for yesterday's shooting in Paris, the race is more up in the air than ever. [more inside]
posted by Cash4Lead at 8:05 AM PST - 82 comments

Two weeks ago, the Borussia Dortmund team bus was on route to their Quarter-final first leg Champions league match against AS Monaco, when it was attacked by a remotely detonated bomb. Theories were flowing: Islamic terrorists? Antifas displeased by the clubs' association with far-right fans? The same far-right fans displeased with the club's attempts to remove them from the Südtribüne over recent incidents? Leipzig hooligans trying a pay back for those incidents? The truth might be a lot stranger. [more inside]
posted by lmfsilva at 7:57 AM PST - 9 comments

Carmen Cusack performs "You'll Be Back" from Hamilton at this year's Miscast gala celebrating 30 years of the MCC Theatre in New York. The goal of Miscast is to allow Broadway stars perform songs from roles in which they would NEVER be cast. Jennifer Holliday sings “I Am What I Am” from La Cage aux Folles. Brian D’Arcy James performs “Unusual Way” from Nine. Kelli O’Hara performs “Pure Imagination” from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:45 AM PST - 15 comments

In February, 93-year-old Tom Sitter entered The Moth in Madison StorySLAM storytelling contest in Madison, Wisconsin. He told about his Valentine's Day experience in 1933, when he was in third grade. Sitter scored the competition's first-ever perfect ten. [laughter and cheers; h/t Miss Cellania]. The Moth previously.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:11 AM PST - 8 comments

Graham Isadore writes: "Earlier this month I decided to live a week as Ian Mackaye. I wanted to see what I could learn by emulating my hero. What I discovered is that most people don’t know who Ian Mackaye is."
posted by jenkinsEar at 3:47 AM PST - 41 comments