May 3, 2019
Three Cents a Week
“So Much for So Little,” a 1949 Warner Brothers cartoon. Ten minutes of Chuck Jones-directed public health PSA.
Brain breakage, shoe edition
Dooced and Bouncing Back
She was the “queen of the mommy bloggers.” Then her life fell apart.
Where Dooce.com founder Heather Armstrong is today.
The third dimension was there all along...
“Recently, the popular YouTube channel Boundary Break worked closely with developer Yacht Club Games to do a special episode taking a look at the developer’s beloved Shovel Knight series. What the YouTuber found is that the Shovel Knight games are actually 2D games built in a 3D engine. Seeing a game that looks so retro and very 2D get spun around in 3D is trippy. Yacht Club Games developer David D’Angelo explained that this was because the engine was built before the studio knew exactly what they were going to make. While they wanted to make a 2D game, by making the engine 3D it gave them more options and made it easier to debug the game and bring it to multiple platforms.” [via: Kotaku]
"Steampunk is dead, I am told."
From way downtown
What if Elon Musk accidentally causes Snowpiercer?
Working in our billionaires' favor is that—unlike, say, going to Mars—SRM isn't really that complicated: We'd just be dumping some cheap shit up in the sky. Yes, the planes don't exist yet, and some logistics need to be worked out, but almost every estimate of its costs pegs it at the low billions per year—not exactly a dealbreaker for some of the world's tycoons, especially when we place it next to the truly outlandish catastrophes that unchecked warming could bring.Dave Levitan looks at the possibilities for a motivated billionaire to hack the planet to stave off climate change
How Men Became "Emotional Gold Diggers"
Literature's evolution reflected, spurred growing complexity of society
Elizabeth Hart, a specialist in early literature, writes that in medieval or classical texts, “people are constantly planning, remembering, loving, fearing, but they somehow manage to do this without the author drawing attention to these mental states.” This changed dramatically between 1500 and 1700.... Hart suggests that these innovations were spurred by the advent of print, and with it, an explosion in literacy across classes and genders. People could now read in private and at their own pace, re-reading and thinking about reading, deepening a new set of cognitive skills and an appetite for more complex and ambiguous texts. Why Doesn’t Ancient Fiction Talk About Feelings? (Julie Sedivy for Nautilus) [more inside]
"You have no idea how weird we are"
Meow Wolf started as a loose group of penniless punks. Now it’s a multimillion-dollar dream factory... Six years ago, the group was an anarchic collective of artists who were barely known outside Santa Fe, N.M., their hometown. They numbered a dozen, or a few dozen, depending on how you felt like counting, and were known for prankish installations and raucous warehouse parties.< [more inside]
What Is After Capitalism Anyway?
“I believe that the best candidate for an essential “something” in democratic socialism is the ethical passion for social justice and radical democratic community.” The Birth of Social Democracy and the religious origins of European socialism. (Commonweal) “If we, as socialists, adopt this kind of too-snarky, radicaler-than-thou mentality, which obviously we can all slip into at times, we’ll alienate the potential base that could actually make a better country and a better world.” The Editor of Jacobin on the Evolution of American Socialism (New Yorker, Chotiner Q&A) Worker Cooperatives Part 1: Widening the sphere of democracy (58:00) Part 2: Democratic Economy, The Mondragon Corporation and Coperative Jackson (57:00) Inside the “most neoliberal country on Earth”, a Chilean town models actually existing common ownership. “Anyone who is not an owner of the means of production is on our side of the class struggle. ” (Jacobin) Nicos Poulantzas tried to envision how the left could simultaneously champion rank-and-file democracy at a distance from the state and push for radical transformation from within it. (Dissent) [more inside]
And Two of Them Eschew Hair Straightening
Tall Pork
"I don't know if you buy a lot of fake vegan meats, but they're all mimicking actual meat– fake vegan chicken, fake vegan pork.... Given that it's all pretend anyway, why not simulate more exotic flesh? We've prepared these rebranding suggestions, just in case you run a vegan meat company." From the manufacturers of Oglaf. [Rebranding link is safe for work if not for lunch, but anything else at their patreon or Oglaf is likely extremely NSFW] [more inside]
The Wookiees are Upset Today
« Previous day | Next day »