May 18, 2020
8 Types of Grilled Cheese
It's a rewarding life, but it's not an easy one
Ted Woodford is a luthier and guitar repairer in Hamilton, Ontario, who has a YouTube channel.
Slow, gentle tv at its very finest. Exactly what I needed to stumble over. [more inside]
Octomom
No, that that Octomom. This is a Radiolab episode that runs about 35 minutes about exactly what a deep sea octopus mother does to brood her eggs. It's an astonishing story that is moving and surprising. There's also a transcript.
Don't let your memes be schemes
Drama On The Internets this weekend as Reddit's admins ousted the mods and top users of a popular satirical subreddit, /r/PresidentialRaceMemes. The wrinkle this time? Most of those banned are the same person.
As outlined in this exhaustive report from /r/Digital_Manipulation [mirror], redditor /u/AlarmedScholar (best known for his "It Is Time" memes saluting the end of each Democratic campaign) was at the center of a web of literally dozens of alternate accounts, aggressively spamming his own subreddit networks into popularity and using questionable moderation tactics to steer PRM from cheeky fun to unceasing vitriol against presumptive nominee Joe Biden (alongside fervent support for Bernie Sanders Howie Hawkins Jesse Ventura Howie Hawkins again).
Shades of Unidan, shades of Digg Patriots, shades of various the_donald purges... with 92 of the top 500 subreddits controlled by just four users, is Reddit the next battleground in the social media manipulation wars? [more inside]
AI Escape Rooms: "You can't hide from the cat, [it] is always watching."
If you’ve ever done an escape room, you know that you can pay to be stuck in a room - except that you get to choose your own form of peril and there’s generally less time spent baking and watching shows. In case we run out of ways to be trapped in a room, Jesse Morris, an actual escape room designer, sent me the names of about 1100 existing escape rooms so I could train a neural net to generate more. Escape rooms, from AI Weirdness (previous AI weirdness).
To a racist, any ground gained by “them” is ground lost by “us”
"This is the Disney Songbook Table of Elements"
"nobody:
me: in the history of disney animated movies there have been exactly 18 types of songs, and i'm going to tell you about each of them" (SLTwitterThread) [more inside]
me: in the history of disney animated movies there have been exactly 18 types of songs, and i'm going to tell you about each of them" (SLTwitterThread) [more inside]
Contemporary and Modern Arab art
Beirut's Dalloul Art Foundation, featuring contemporary and modern art from across the Arab world, has now placed much of its collection of over 4,000 works online. Fantastic, abstract, conceptual, timely and political, the works are sortable by country, medium and artist (scroll down to see more images on most pages). Detailed bios are being added, many with neat video. Basel Dalloul, whose father Ramzi began the collection 50 years ago, says he's being careful to include "an equal balance of male and female artists." [more inside]
🦅 C-O-M-B-O 🛹
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2 remastered [YouTube][Announcement Trailer] “The first two Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games are coming to modern platforms with a remaster called Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2, publisher Activision announced Tuesday. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2 will be released on PlayStation 4, Windows PC, and Xbox One on Sept. 4. Vicarious Visions, which remastered the first three Crash Bandicoot games for 2017’s Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, is developing the new Tony Hawk collection. The remastered collection will include the original levels, pro skaters, and tricks from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, as well as tricks from later games, like the revert, lip tricks, and wall plant.” [via: Polygon] [more inside]
"in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick…"
"So it might seem that my friend was skirting some dangerous ground in suggesting that we need new metaphors. “The healthiest way of being ill,” Sontag advised, “is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.” But this underestimates the role metaphor plays in helping us make sense of a world that has fundamentally shifted around us. The term’s origin is in the Greek expression to be carried across. Metaphors make meaning by substituting one term for another. Since the pandemic arrived we have all found ourselves carried across into a new reality, the world we knew replaced by one that resembles it but is also radically changed." With Apologies to Susan Sontag, We’re Going to Need Metaphor to Get Through This Global Illness (LitHub)
"Never again, regulators vowed"
Whistleblower: Wall Street Has Engaged in Widespread Manipulation of Mortgage Funds (Heather Vogell, ProPublica, 15 May 2020) [more inside]
The Age of (Not That) Innocence
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