September 21, 2020
Uber, But For Evictions
One of the major problems with the economic downturn has been people falling behind on rent, threatening them with eviction. Another has been the lack of jobs making the working class desperate for work. And as Vice reports, a new gig economy firm calling itself Civvl is trying to marry the two together to make money, turning the execution of evictions into a gig economy job. (SLVice)
Longcat was long
Nobiko, a Japanese cat known for an extreme, memeworthy length of 65 cm (well over two feet), has died at the age of 18. I have a clear idea of how this cat got wedged in our consciousness, and why.
You can get by with a charming and rakish state of informality
Now that the supermarket is no longer a festival of goodies but rather a militantly regimented prophylaxis hellscape, I dread going there. Now I try to avoid it. Now, when I do go, I try to plan and buy a week’s worth of groceries so that I won’t have to go back for a while. This doesn’t really work—it never works—for me, an incredibly disorganized person with cataclysmic ADHD Brain; this means that, once a week or so, I enter the late-afternoon pre-dinner period worrying because I accidentally forgot to perform some number of preparatory steps necessary to whatever insane dinner I’d wrongly thought I had the capacity to plan several days in advance. And this is when, reliably, I can open the refrigerator, peer around for a few seconds, and realize that for all my disorganization and chaos, I have the means to throw together a perfectly delicious frittata. [more inside]
Bras
Why Girls Stop Running in the Tween Years and the simple solution to keep them active. [more inside]
Do You Remember?
Wait for Tanqueray to step out on stage and take it all away
When Tanqueray, a former exotic dancer, introduced herself to Brandon Stanton by teasing him for wearing shorts in the cold, a friendship began. Tanqueray has a lifetime's worth of wild stories to tell about stripping in NYC in the '60s and '70s, and Stanton, who runs Humans of New York, shared her inimitable voice in November. The internet loved her and wanted more. Now Tattletales from Tanqueray will be updating over the course of this week, allowing this remarkable, hilarious woman to share her life story. (Available on Facebook, Twitter, and IG.)
(CW: child abuse, slurs, explicit language) [more inside]
(CW: child abuse, slurs, explicit language) [more inside]
"This is the largest dataset of its kind ever produced."
Newspaper Navigator is a project being carried out by Ben Lee (his announcement on Twitter), Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress. It extracts visual content from 16+ million pages of sixty years of public domain digitized American newspapers and helps people learn to search the visual content using machine learning techniques. Read the FAQ to learn more about how its creator tried to manage algorithmic bias. Fun search terms are offered if you're not feeling creative: national park, giraffe, blimp, hats, stunts. The dataset is publicly available, the code is available and here's a white paper about the process of building it.
It's Twilight Time
A full trailer for WandaVision premiered during last night's Emmy broadcast. Den of Geek provides a breakdown of some of the clues appearing in the trailer, including one that may indicate how a certain segment of the Marvel Universe could be brought into the MCU.
Identifying Luck in Mario Party
For two decades and across seven systems, the Mario Party games have been a beloved but frustrating experience. You might try with all your might to be the damnable Super Star, but a plethora of factors, some luck-related but some not, conspire to throw the match to your eight-year-old cousin who always plays Yoshi. YouTuber ZoomZike has compiled amazing and exhaustive videos going through every element of four games in the series, and showing what can be manipulated and what can't. It's IDENTIFYING LUCK IN MARIO PARTY: One - Two - Three - Four [more inside]
Say hey, good lookin'
In edition #3 of Metafilter's September fundraising chat topics, we are solicited to pose the time honored* questions, "whatcha got cookin'?," "how's about cookin' somethin' up with me?," and "don't you think maybe we could find us a brand new recipe?" IOW some good folks have spent 💰hard cash💰for us to ask you about your favorite recipes, so please share the goods! [more inside]
"standing side by side at the sink, talking softly as they clean"
ShanaStoryteller retells fairytales (such as "The stepsisters and Cinderella band together to survive their mother’s abusive treatment.") and Greek and Roman mythology (as with Arachne: "She is not honest as a virtue, but as a vice.").
Richard
Richard is a sample chapter from Allie Brosh's new book "Solutions and Other Problems" announced (previously).
Shark week is every week
As the weather warms up in the Southern Hemisphere, Teddy Geiger releases her latest single, Sharkbait.
On the other side of the ocean, Jaimie Shorten has won this year’s 2020 Antepavilion for designing an experimental installation featuring a family of six sharks leaping and lunging from the Regent’s Canal.
In further shark related goodness, find out how sharks have sex, hear from a shark attack victim turned shark protector, and reflect on why we're so scared of sharks anyway.
She can feel like 'a strange cult classic'.
Enya Is Everywhere - "Amid Enya's many decades of candlelit mystique and mythological lyrics, it's an outlier—an inquisitive ode to love lost, like an ambient girl-group 45—and as it snuck up on me, its pull became overwhelming. 'Even in the Shadows' reminded me of music by younger artists whom I knew Enya inspired, like Ioanna Gika, but it was, beguilingly, from her most recent album, 2015's Dark Sky Island. 'That song is me exposing myself', Enya said then. 'It's a heartbreak song. I've never done a heartbreak song before'. She was 54."
« Previous day | Next day »