April 22, 2015
Alton Brown explains it all!
“Universal love,” said the cactus person.
A short story about DMT by Scott Alexander
“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.
“Right,” I said. “I’m absolutely in favor of both those things. But before we go any further, could you tell me the two prime factors of 1,522,605,027,922,533,360,535,618,378,132,637,429,718,068,114,961,380,688,657,908,494,580,122,963,258,952,897,654,000,350,692,006,139?”
Homeless Millennials Are Transforming Hobo Culture
My work is a synthesis of Art and Magick
BGRGPOOMC, a rainbow of singles
"Lots of people were like “oh, I recorded a car backfiring & pitched it down & combined it with some bees buzzing & 100 plugins to make a kick drum” & I just decided that this was really stupid when you could use a 909 & it would sound way better."
In 2004, Donnacha Costello released the Colorseries, a collection of ten 12-inch singles that became a building block in the rise of minimal techno. In 2007, Costello released a single CD, best-of compilation version to mixed but generally positive reviews; it's crime was being an abridged collection. (2007 interview)
Now, you can stream the entire collection at Costello's bandcamp. Or, for a curated digest, you can listen to Ryan Elliot's 2005 Mix that blends all twenty tracks over the course of an hour.
In 2004, Donnacha Costello released the Colorseries, a collection of ten 12-inch singles that became a building block in the rise of minimal techno. In 2007, Costello released a single CD, best-of compilation version to mixed but generally positive reviews; it's crime was being an abridged collection. (2007 interview)
Now, you can stream the entire collection at Costello's bandcamp. Or, for a curated digest, you can listen to Ryan Elliot's 2005 Mix that blends all twenty tracks over the course of an hour.
Write on.
Have we learned something?
Waiting in line for the Rube Goldberg roller coaster
"Showing up as Rube’s granddaughter, you’re kind of like this strange mascot," she told me. "It’s like being mother to many, many children." What she saw there upset her. "Some of those machines were so spectacularly beautiful, but beautiful in a way that a car is a beautiful machine," George recalled. "The winning machine was basically a glorified marble run," she said, repeating her criticism of Iowa’s machine. "A beautiful, precision marble run. But it was not a Rube Goldberg machine. There was nothing about it that was a Rube Goldberg machine."
Poor Ivy League Students
No, this is not a snarky article about privileged kids at Harvard. It's a serious article about 1st generation college students from lower income backgrounds at prestigious schools, that are outstanding academic students on full ride scholarships, yet struggling to fit in on a campus where the vast majority of their fellow students come from privileged backgrounds.
The Wrath of Diana Kennedy
A great interview with Diana Kennedy, who knows more about the traditions of Mexican cooking and the ingredients involved than I ever will! Her book The Art of Mexican Cooking is not just a collection of recipes. Kennedy intersperses anecdotes and explanations of processes. Her descriptions of the ingredients she uses are worth the price of the book.
I've got yer terroir right here
Scientists create toe cheese from human toe bacteria. "Cheese is known for its stinky odor. But, cheeses at one exhibit at the Science Gallery Dublin in Trinity College Dublin come from an especially smelly source -- human toe, armpit, belly button and mouth bacteria.
"Selfmade, which is part of the Grow Your Own…Life After Nature exhibition, features different “microbial sketches” of cheeses created with bacteria samples from various people. Each cheese supposedly smells similar to the donor’s body odor."
"Selfmade, which is part of the Grow Your Own…Life After Nature exhibition, features different “microbial sketches” of cheeses created with bacteria samples from various people. Each cheese supposedly smells similar to the donor’s body odor."
A Punch in the Gut
Anyone else could have saved her: Life is Strange gave my personal tragedy a score
What I do want to suggest, however, is that far more than any other form of media, creators of video games need to be aware that this medium not only increases engagement but also increases the emotional burden on affected players in a unique way. I have watched films and read comics in the past that dealt with themes of unprevented suicide and, while difficult for me to get through, passive forms of media have never left me this distraught. By giving me control of the situation in Life is Strange, developer Dontnod Entertainment suddenly forced me to inspect my own agency in my life. That has an emotional price attached. This is the power and beauty of games; what feels like an echo of pain in other art forms feels like a punch in the gut when the same topic is explored in a well-made game. (emphasis added)[more inside]
Flooding the Zone
In an interview with Lucky Peach, Lockhart Steele (previously) talks about "flooding the zone" in the blog era:
One of the things that I try to say to the team at all of our sites is, Hey, let’s not be afraid to still be weird. Because as you get bigger, you can get forced to just be so mainstream. You have more people coming to your site, so you have more readers who are going to be confused by your obsessions, who are going to be like, What’s the joke, I don’t get it. And you have to be okay with people not getting it.via Super Punch
Let Them Eat Privilege
The one percent isn’t some amorphous boogeyman inside all of us... It’s a very real class. And we don’t need a list of cultural “symptoms” of one-percent-style privilege to figure out who they are. Just run the numbers. If your household — or to be generous, the one you grew up in — makes an adjusted gross income of at least $343,000, you are, in fact, the one percent. Even if you smoke meth, went to boot camp, and are on your third marriage. Yes, even if most of your friends didn’t finish college and live kinda far from a Whole Foods. Now, if you or the household you grew up in make an adjusted gross income of less than $340,000, you are, technically, the 99 percent.Let Them Eat Privilege
Strategies Against Interviews
Paul Morley conducts arguably the worst ever Brian Eno interview sometime in 1992. "A boring question is when you already know the answer" and other throwaways. [more inside]
WTF is a Met?
Chris Rock on HBO's Real Sports explaining why Black People Do Not Watch Baseball, and Why It Matters
<+]:¬)
Will Pope Francis Break the Church? [The Atlantic]
“Told this way—conservative Jesuit fights post–Vatican II radicalization, finds himself shunned by left-wing confreres, gets rescued by a John Paul appointee—the story of Francis’s rise and fall and rise sounds for all the world like The Making of a Conservative Pope. And indeed, a number of Catholic writers greeted Bergoglio’s election—some optimistically, some despairingly—with exactly that interpretation of his past’s likely impact on his papacy. But it seems fair to say that this interpretation was mistaken. So how, exactly, did the man who fought bitterly with left-wing Jesuits in the 1970s become the darling of progressive Catholics in the 2010s?”Previously. Previously.
Gotta move for the camera, lady
American Reflexxx is a short film documenting a social experiment that took place in South Carolina. Alli Coates filmed performance artist Signe Pierce as she strutted down a busy oceanside street in stripper garb and a reflective mask. The results are horrifying.
An odd dance towards a murder, or a suicide by request
This all happened a long time ago, at a time when Baker was smoking a lot of weed. All the strange interactions he had with Doc over the years have blurred together. At a certain point, things began to feel inevitable, all Baker’s small choices gaining momentum until it felt as though there were no more choices to make. And while he insists that he has no regrets about what took place later — it happened the way it should have, the way it had to — maybe if he’d made a different decision that afternoon, he wouldn’t be in prison right now. Because it can all be traced back to that very first time they met, when Doc turned to him and asked, straight-faced, as if it was the most normal thing in the world: “Have you ever thought about killing someone?”
Mystery Train
Southwark Park Tube Station has been rediscovered after 100 years. Workers uncovered the 'ghost station' during construction of the new Thameslink line. Although Network Rail knew the location of the site, which closed in 1915 due to the war, it was still a surprise that so much of the original 1902 structure remained intact. Southwark Park was only open for 13 years but had already made it into transport history as the home of Corbett's Lane signal box, said to be the first regular signal box in the world. [more inside]
Happy Earth Day! (oy vey)
Happy Earth Day! Courtesy of a mad man and a mad man (who just happens to be the father of Serial host Sarah Koenig!).
That music, you know. I just get carried away in it.
Alice Barker is 102, but when she was young, she was a chorus dancer in Harlem. Watch and listen to more American vernacular music and dance at Celluloid Improvisation (autoplays swing music. via).
Genius, audacity and avant-garde
At the age of 50, Maya Plisetskaya danced to Ravels Bolero, choreographed by Maurice Bejart.
At 61 and with arms like flowing ribbon she danced the Dying Swan [more inside]
But who or what are we dealing with?
Collage (Some NSFW)
by Franz Falckenhaus, a prolific self taught Polish artist who lives in Warsaw.
Much of his output has a decidedly retro feel to it.
Then there is his Flickr page and his web.
Much of his output has a decidedly retro feel to it.
Then there is his Flickr page and his web.
Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Don't Rape
"But, Coach—we play football!" Inside Amy Schumer does a parody of Friday Night Lights and certain aspects of football culture.
Have you ever had a search engine provide your cell service? You will.
Renowned not-evil search engine company Google just formally announced its long-rumoured MVNO: Google Fi. [more inside]
Lyrics: Ah the eve ah ah / Ah ah ah ahhh
The Singamajig Symphony sings Journey's Open Arms. The Singamajig Symphony sings the Beatles' Hey Jude.
Swamps Élysées: the Queen of Gator
Meet Georgia’s Christy Plott Redd, the self-proclaimed monarch holds court from the bayous of Louisiana to the posh boutiques of Paris. Her calling card? The skins of the American alligator.
Dogme '99
"We wanted to kill the game," says Eirik Fatland, a Norwegian interaction designer who has spent over twenty years creating, participating in, and theorizing about these types of forward-thinking LARPs. In 1999, he and some others started a movement called Dogma 99. Modeled after Lars Von Trier's Dogme 95 and Jerzy Grotowski's minimalist, impulse-driven notion of a "poor theatre," the movement included a ten-point "vow of chastity" intended to maximize LARP's dramatic immersion, while removing pretty much everything else.
MAD AL
For the first time in its 63 year history, MAD Magazine has just put out an issue with a Guest Editor: "Weird Al" Yankovic. And he's not just a figurehead*; the issue includes "Pages from Weird Al's Notebook", several of Al's celebrity friends including Patton Oswalt and John Hodgman as guest writers, and caricatures of Al from 11 different MAD artists. The best online collection of sample pages is here. [more inside]
The Upwardly Mobile Barista
When it comes to college, the central challenge for most Americans in the 21st century is not going; it’s finishing. Thirty-five million Americans now have some college experience but no degree.
Amanda Ripley in The Atlantic follows a group of Starbucks employees taking advantage of the corporation's partnership with Arizona State University, and discovers some of the reasons why so few low-income students graduate on time, or ever get a degree at all.
The Upwardly Mobile Barista.
No, these oysters, they were purely oysters as a concept
A trio of Haruki Murakami's Advertorial Short Stories: In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Onward spent massive sums on advertising J. Press in the print media. The classic ad format, often seen on the back cover of lifestyle magazine Popeye, showed a Japanese or American man telling a colorful story about their favorite trad clothing item. In 1985, as Japanese pop culture went in more avant-garde directions, Onward came up with a new idea — asking up-and-coming novelist Murakami Haruki to write a very short story inside each month’s advertisement for magazines Popeye, Box, and Men’s Club. [more inside]
"Heh heh heh," everyone said.
"An old school trader who's good with reflexes and doing things quick"
The story of Navinder Singh Sarao, futures trader who might have caused the flash crash of 2010 (previously), arrested yesterday for wire fraud.
The futures exchange wrote to Sarao on the day of the flash crash, telling him to stop spoofing, and he called them back "and told em to kiss my ass." And then regulators pondered that reply for five years before deciding that they'd prefer to have him arrested in London and extradited to face criminal spoofing charges. One conclusion here might be that rudeness to regulators really works.[more inside]
You cannot police me / So get off my areola
Before someone gets in and asks, "do we have to have a Metafilter post every time Janelle Monae does something?" I'll just point out that yes, yes we do [elmer benson]. Metafilter loves Janelle Monae, and now she's back with her "dexterous flow" and fellow musician Jidenna for Yoga, the second single from Wondaland Records's upcoming The Eephus.
This is why I scoop spiders up with toilet paper
Just like in those horror films NSF people-who-hate-spiders-or-who-hate-killing-spiders
via cbcnews.ca [more inside]
Hello. Would You Like to Conform Contemporarily?
The Contemporary Conformist. "The contemporary conformist attempts to exude wealth. The contemporary conformist is a pseudo-affluent lifestyle where you attempt to rationalize ‘taste’ as your ticket to luxury." From Carles.buzz. [more inside]
"There have been struggles; there is no doubt about that. "
Yesterday, the organizers of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival announced that this summer's festival will be their last. [more inside]
halp
The secret man who drinks at work
An Oral HistoryOf ‘Mad Men’ - as recounted to Clickhole by Matthew Weiner and the cast. May contain spoilers and inaccuracies.
An Interview with T. M. Scanlon
Yascha Mounk at the utopian conducts An Interview with T.M. Scanlon: I: Free Will, Punishment and The Significance of Choice
T.M. (Tim) Scanlon is Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity at Harvard, a moral philosopher, expert in contractualism, and the author of What We Owe To Each Other [more inside]The Utopian: One of philosophy’s oldest worries is causal determinism: the fear that, if what we do and think is determined by physical processes beyond our control, then we should abandon moral categories like praise and blame and choice. But I take it that you’re less worried about that than many of your colleagues?Tim Scanlon: I think there are three ways in which this problem arises – the problem being the possibility that a causal explanation of a reaction we give would undermine its significance in one way or another.
Rolling Down to Old Maui
For decades, Maui was the whaling capital of the world. Whalers descended upon the islands in vast numbers as a port of supply and resting in between six-month jaunts to the Arctic North. The Candian and American whalers influenced Hawaiian culture, of course, bringing potato farming and prostitution in their wake. But the transfer wasn't all one way--Hawaiian-born whalers visited Nantucket, and Nantucket papers certainly reported on Hawaiian politics.
Eeny, meeny, miny, mo: Counting ditties long ago
Eena, meena, mina, mo, /
Cracka, feena, fina, fo, /
Uppa, nootcha, poppa, tootcha, /
Ring, ding, dang, doe.
"Losing Count: “Eeny, meeny, miny, mo” and the ambiguous history of counting-out rhymes," from The Paris Review.
Bibbity-bee Bitey Bibbity-bee
Water Table
California's crippling drought has prompted conservation efforts, such as replacing grass lawns and minding how long you leave the tap water running. But what about the food on your plate? Agriculture uses 80% of California's water supply, and producing what you eat can require a surprising amount of water. The LA Times' Interactive Water Footprint tells you How much water is used to produce your food? [more inside]
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