July 4, 2018
it's coming to someone's home.
The World Cup Round of 16 is over, and winning teams have moved on into the Quarter-Finals. 2018 World Cup Predictions [more inside]
Careful man, there's a beverage here.
Whenever a company sends us water to review I always find myself at a loss. From a recent review at ThirstyDudes.com, which has been reviewing nonalcoholic beverages for most of this decade.
Medieval Monsters as Propaganda
How medieval artists used monsters as propaganda When someone does something that so viciously lacks in humanity, we call them a monster. Through action or belief, they have removed themselves from human decency, and become something grotesque. But society can also turn people into monsters through the way they’re depicted and treated. [more inside]
Relationships unfolding in moments of realization--two SF/F stories
Ruth Joffre, "Nitrate Nocturnes" (Lightspeed, April 2018): "Fiona's timer read 40 33 04 21 53 08. Years, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds. Her first girlfriend had done the math one day in bed. 'You'll be sixty-four when you meet your soul mate. I'll be twenty-two.'" Johanna Skibsrud, "The Origin of Species" (Hazlitt, 26 March 2018): "For the most part, everyone who'd actually seen it agreed that something had happened. Just what exactly was more difficult to say."
Man Spends 23 Years Carving Sprawling Underground Temple Under His House
"Levon Arakelyan was 44 years old in 1985, when his wife asked him to dig a potato storage pit under their house in the village of Arinj, in Armenia’s Kotayk region. He obliged, but after finishing work on the pit, he just couldn’t stop chiselling, so he kept at it every day, for the next 23 years." Man Spends 23 Years Carving Sprawling Underground Temple Under His House. [more inside]
The Weight, The Loss, The Songs
"I don’t know what it is about songs that can make you feel the weight of people or their loss or the fact of your own. But they do." What Is the Most Nostalgic Song of All Time? Mike Jollett, for The Village Voice.
No she doesn't fall off the bed
Dan Fowlks and his wife went out on a date and afterwards, while she took the babysitter home, he serenaded his ten-month-old daughter with Bobby Darrin's "Dream Lover." There was a followup video that addressed some concerns.
Boy Bite With Bowl And Bowser
A mid-'90s advertisement for Super-Mario-themed Kraft Mac 'n Cheese, sandwiched around a weirdly compelling yet matter-of fact narration detailing all the parts that went into producing it.
Singin' to God
Years in the making, Singin' to God, David Minnick's a cappella cover version of Cardiacs' 1995 double album Sing to God has finally been released. [more inside]
The itty-bittiest publishing platform on the web.
Letter to an Unknown Lender
"The foundational myth of an entire generation of Americans was the false promise that education was priceless—that its value was above or beyond its cost. College was not a right or a privilege but an inevitability on the way to a meaningful adulthood. What an irony that the decisions I made about college when I was seventeen have derailed such a goal." (CW: some discussion of suicidal thoughts)
a reckoning can’t begin and end with the self.
If you want to know why women are so angry, it’s because this ritual tends to exclude the injured party. This “talk about how you’re going to do and be better” stuff isn’t actually a great formula for reconciliation. It offers neither retributive nor restorative justice. It privileges public acceptance over making things right with the actual victims, who barely seem to register at all. But it’s pretty effective: In an age of never-ending public relations wars, we’re so starved for any sign of sincere spiritual struggle that we rush to reward self-proclaimed sinners who say they’re trying to make good.Lili Loofbourow: Junot Díaz and the problem of the male self-pardon.
Trust me, grandson / The war was in color.
The war was in color. Most of the photographs from WWI are black and white because color photography was in its infancy. This article links to four sources of color photographs, although many images are on more than one site. Content warning: while most images are not graphic, a few are.
The post title is from the poem briefly quoted in the article.
putting boning in a binder
THINGS I NEED TO FUCKING KNOW: Why every fuckin trans man or nb person I know who binds is like “oh binders are the worst, you can’t breathe in them, I know someone who broke a rib once”. And meanwhile over in historical costuming, we are fucking eating, sleeping, swordfighting, riding horses, and feeling great in smooth-bodiced corsets. What if the secret to making a better binder is to add boning? What might be possible?
Scottish MP breaks taboo & discusses her period in House of Commons
Last week, Scottish Labour Member of Parliament Danielle Rowley explained that the reason she was late to a debate in the House of Commons was because she had her period. She noted that it had cost her £25 already that week and that the annual average cost of menstrual products in the UK per person is £500. Rowley then called for action to address the issue of period poverty in the UK. Meanwhile, Member of Scottish Parliament Monica Lennon (Labour) has garnered support at 96% from all 5 parties for her bill proposing Scottish Parliament provide free menstrual supplies to everyone who needs them. [more inside]
Tragedy or comedy, probably publicity
Hollywood history podcast You must Remember This (previously) is back, with a new series fact checking Kenneth Anger's book Hollywood Babylon, the salacious and imperfect tell-all that is the origin of many of Hollywood's urban myths. Interview with more on the book and the podcast.
Percussive Daft Punk Medly [SLYT 5min 52sec]
Amusing Percussive Daft Punk Medly A medley of Daft Songs played on the RimbaTubes and a plethora of other instruments by Youtuber Snubby J. [more inside]
62984 bytes free
The BASIC Engine is an open-source computer the size of a Raspberry Pi, modelled on the home computers of the late 80s/early 90s. It connects to a composite (PAL/NTSC) monitor/television, has connections for a PS/2 keyboard and a PlayStation game controller, contains a BASIC interpreter with a Commodore-style screen editor and an Infocom Z-Code interpreter, and has 256-colour graphics with software sprites, 5-bit digital audio, a SoundFont-based wavetable music synthesiser and 16 GPIO pins. You can't actually buy it, but for about €10 and passable soldering skills, you can build your own. [more inside]
A Wonderful Exercise in Absurdism
A Work of Art by Janet Malcolm [SLNYRB]
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