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But I have nothing to read no longer an excuse
Why read an average book when you could read a great book? With so little time to read, why waste time on a so-so book? But how do you find the best books to read? Most people read whatever they stumble across at the moment. Other folks read book reviews and get recommendations from friends. Even fewer join book clubs.For those despairing of finding enough decent science fiction to read, James W. Harris sets out how to find the best science fiction books to read, including his own classics of science fiction list.
We *Are* Aquatic Mammals
This Is What Happens To Your Heart When You Dive Into The Sea
Human blood has a chemical composition 98% similar to seawater. An infant will reflexively breaststroke when placed underwater and can comfortably hold his breath for about 40 seconds, longer than many adults. We lose this ability only when we learn how to walk.
Background Music
The Seeburg 1000
was a phonograph designed and built by the Seeburg Corporation to play background music in offices, restaurants, retail businesses, factories and similar locations, cycling through a stack of non-standard 16-2/3 RPM vinyl records provided by Seeburg in one of three different libraries of music: Basic, Mood and Industrial*.
And now, it has its own Internet Radio Station!
*in the 1960s, that meant "medium-fast tempo music of a lively nature, to induce workers to be more productive."
And now, it has its own Internet Radio Station!
*in the 1960s, that meant "medium-fast tempo music of a lively nature, to induce workers to be more productive."
Organic Lawn Care for the Cheap and Lazy
Organic Lawn Care for the Cheap and Lazy
: What it says on the tin.
Yes, yes, hadouken, but why hadouken, and when?
"How to play Street Fighter: a fighting game primer for everyone" explains the dynamics of how 2D fighting games work and why.
Free HTML5 website templates
HTML5up.net provides free, Creative Commons licensed, HTML5 website templates you can use to make a modern-looking website.
Anthem of Dystopian America
Following in the footsteps of other songs switching up minor keys and major keys, Chase Holfelder's Star-Spangled Banner in minor key is particularly haunting.
Help me figure out my life... goals? wants? needs?
This has been a year of change (breakup, move, deaths, grad school). I'm home at my parents' for the holidays and want to take some time to reflect on what I want for the next year and the rest of my life. I feel like I'm entering a new phase of life, and want to do it with self-knowledge and a vision of what I want it to be. This includes career, love, friendships, travel, everything. I'm hoping you can recommend exercises, readings, and approaches to figuring out what I truly want and (to a lesser extent) how to get there.
You cannot outrun the past, because the past is awesome.
If cruising through neon wireframe landscapes is your kind of thing, and previous mefi posts haven’t satisfied your burning desire for synth wave/retro electro/neo 80s, then perhaps you would be interested in a few of the following albums...
In Kyrgyzstan, there was one that was made like a traditional Kyrgyz hat
Photographer Chris Herwig (previously) has successfully kickstarted a photo book on the oddball bus-stops of the former Soviet republics, compiled over 12 years and spanning 12 countries. You can browse many of the photos at Herwig's website. Reporter Alina Simone reported on the project and the bus stops for PRI's The World. The PRI site also has a video slide show of the stops narrated by Herwig.
On bitbuddychat everyone is talking about a scam some people fell for.
Curious about Bitcoin but nervous about risking your hard-earned fiat dollars? Get the whole experience with the Advanced Bitcoin Simulator!
"No history is accurate, not even the very best we have."
In How History Can Be Used in Fiction historian Ada Palmer explores how two TV series about the Borgia family succeed or fail at conveying a period feel, where and why modern sensibilities influence the shows, and how the characterization of a protagonist whose age is historically uncertain can be affected by making him younger or older. It finally concludes with a discussion of why communication can be more important than accuracy and why some changes from historical fact strengthen fiction and others weaken it.
Essential novels of the 20th-21st century
I know next to nothing about 20th and 21st century literature. What are some recommendations for "essential" novels that I can start with?
The Pacific Crest Trail
On May 17, 2013 I was dropped off in Campo, California at the US/Mexico Border. Four and a half months later I was in Manning Park, British Columbia having walked the 2,600 mile Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) across California, Oregon, and Washington to get there.
This is what I saw.
Even if Bloomberg Didn't, You Can!
Programmers will tell you that coding is one of the most approachable
skills there is. If you want to learn, there's
Code Academy, or perhaps
LearnPython.org. There are
major non-profits that want to help you learn,
free
books,
and videos. Great!
Finished with all of those?
"I would like to send you a memory"
Sad YouTube: The Lost Treasures Of The Internet’s Greatest Cesspool
Mark Slutsky, of Sad YouTube (previously) writes about the, "Moments of melancholy, sadness and saudade from the lives of strangers, gleaned from the unfairly maligned ocean of YouTube comments."
Say this, not that
Recently I discovered some great phrases that work much better than the standard response to a situation, and was wondering if anyone had any others.
Would you believe...
What do you need to be an international CONTROL super spy fighting the forces of KAOS? A Shoe-Phone. A Cone of Silence. A Bulletproof Invisible Wall and a Laser Blazer. Then, and only then, can you Get Smart.
Lynch on the Air
On the Air: "While mixing the sound for an episode of the second season of Twin Peaks, Lynch was hit with a sudden inspiration. 'It just came into my head, the idea of people trying to do something successful and having it all go wrong.' Following the initial success of Twin Peaks, David Lynch and Mark Frost were hot properties in Television. When they approached ABC with the idea for 'On the Air,' the network was eager to take them up on the offer. The show itself was a half-hour absurdist comedy featuring many of the cast and crew from Twin Peaks. The pilot tested very well, and six more episodes were ordered. However, by the time it came to scheduling the On the Air, things with Twin Peaks had already fallen apart, and the network was no longer eager to work with Lynch." On the Air was received so poorly (due, in part, to being premeired in the summer on a Saturday timeslot) that only three episodes were ever aired in the states. However, the entirety of the program was aired overseas. In Episode 1 the misfit crew of the Zablotnick Broadcasting Corporation struggles to put together the first episode of the Lester Guy Show.
The Bus.
Paul Kirchner's The Bus is a surreal gag strip that ran in Heavy Metal magazine in the early 80s. It can be bought as a book, but the book is out of print. Here it is on Imgur. Downright scrumptious, old-fashioned flavor with that 70s east-coast anomie vibe.
Help me find the kind of recipe that sticks in your memory for decades.
What are your favourite simple recipes that make "guests plead for the secret"?
The Bible as fanwank and flamewars
Confused about who wrote the Bible we have, and why? Jim MacDonald has the answers.
How was the Canon of the Christian Bible selected? There really isn't a better, or funnier, short account than this. After all, if fandom is a religion, then religions must work like fandom, right? And the epistolatory disputes of late antiquity were just Usenet to the Greeks. So if you want to know how the Doctrine of the Trinity became important, this will explain it:
Give me deep, random, funny, stupid, and personal questions to ask.
My partner and I want to fill a hat with as many questions as possible, so that we can pull a couple of questions out of it each time we're together. We chat a lot but we both think it'd be great to have something else to spark conversations. I think it'll work best if neither of us know what most of the questions are. Hence why I'd like your lists of deep, funny, stupid or random questions to ask that will spark a conversation.
Learning about (your) camera(s) in text and video
If you wanted to understand how cameras work, you could spend some time with your camera manual. If it's not handy (or not helpful), you might opt to read through Wikipedia pages about film speed, ISO and digital equivalents, F-numbers (f-stop* or relative aperture), and depth of field (DOF). If you prefer, you could read "tedious explanations" of f-stop and depth of field and other photographic topics from Matthew Coles. Or you can spend 45 minutes watching 3 videos from YouTube user Dylan Bennett, as he explains ISO, F-stop and depth of field. Then you can join Joe Brady for a few hour-long sessions on setting up your camera for Portrait Photography with Ambient Light and Landscape Photography, and mastering exposure for landscape photography
Ex Urbe
"But Freud had a second fear: a fear of Rome's layers. In formal treatises, he compared the psyche to an ancient city, with many layers of architecture built one on top of another, each replacing the last, but with the old structures still present underneath. In private writings he phrased this more personally, that he was terrified of ever visiting Rome because he was terrified of the idea of all the layers and layers and layers of destroyed structures hidden under the surface, at the same time present and absent, visible and invisible. He was, in a very deep way, absolutely right."
What is a life changing realization that you wish you'd had sooner?
I have a birthday coming up soon (28 - which for some reason feels like a milestone to me) and have been spending some time thinking about some of the small epiphanies I've had in the last few years that have made my life infinitely better. Such as - it's ok to let go of friends who no longer bring anything positive into your life; you are not responsible for your mothers happiness; and it's OK if the person you are seriously dating and thinking about settling down with is very different from the person that you thought you'd be with. In fact, it might be a very good thing.
All of this thinking has made me realize that 1) if I had known this a few years earlier I might have avoided some serious heartache and anxiety attacks and 2) that there are probably plenty more epiphanies that I haven't had yet.
So, I'm asking you all wise and all knowing MeFiers - what is a life changing realization you wish you'd had sooner?
“It's exactly what you think it is—a tornado full of sharks”
The rise of video-on-demand services like Netflix and dedicated cable-TV channels has created a new industry in low-budget B-movies; meet Asylum Films, an outfit in California following in the footsteps of historical B-movie auteurs like Roger Corman, Menahem Golan and Uwe Boll, with films with titles like Sharknado, Transmorphers, Sex Pot and Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies. Asylum's new B-movies are made quickly and cheaply to ride the coattails of the big studios' fads, filling gaps in the market for more films about, say, adorable puppies, alien battleships or apocalypses. The films are made to a strict formula, are played entirely seriously, with no hint of irony or knowingness, and are designed primarily to pad out rental lists and appeal to recommendation engines, though the producers point out that often mainstream Hollywood fare is often no less hackneyed and formulaic. (Previously...)
Don't hate me because I'm a '24-Hour Comic'
Darkness
"Sometimes you meet people like that, they have one adjective that fits them like a glove. They could be that word's picture in the dictionary..."
A Frenchman in Brooklyn
In April, French cartoonist Boulet (previous, more previous) was invited to go on tour in the US, courtesy of the French embassy in New York. As a good 'webcomic', he kept a diary of his impressions of New York, the language barrier and going to the MoCCaFest, and also had a book to sell, a reworked edition of his 2012 24-hours comic Darkness (previous).
Boardgames are fun again!
Quintin Smith (of Shut Up & Sit Down) argues that we're entering a golden age of boardgames (45m Vimeo talk).
Thirty Years Later: The last self-help book.
Percy and Sagan in the Cosmos: On the 30th anniversary of "The Last Self-Help Book."
"Lost in the Cosmos is the most peculiar book of Percy's career, and in my judgment his finest achievement. I read it when it first appeared, and if you had asked me at the time whether I expected the book to be relevant in 30 years, I probably would have said no. It seemed so topical, so of its moment; and how long could that moment last? But re-reading it in preparation for this essay I saw how little it matters that many people today will know nothing or nearly nothing about Phil Donahue or Carl Sagan. Their immediate heirs are with us every day when we turn on the TV."
Pride of the Yankees (seeknaY?)
In the classic baseball movie The Pride of the Yankees, Gary Cooper played lefty icon Lou Gehrig--but Cooper was a righty. To cover this up, legend has it the filmmakers made a Yankees uniform for him with the print reversed, had him run to third base rather than first, etc, then flipped the shots after filming. But is it true?
Point of View, Depth of Focus
Scott Eric Kaufman examines the visual rhetoric of Game of Thrones, Doctor Who, Mad Men, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and more.
"Don't you think there is enough anxiety at present?"
CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER: The thing that strikes me about your friend's building -- if I understood you correctly -- is that somehow in some intentional way it is not harmonious. That is, Moneo intentionally wants to produce an effect of disharmony. Maybe even of incongruity.A debate — old, but still relevant — between architects Christopher Alexander (whose new book The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth depicts the struggle between his worldview and Eisenman's at length) and Peter Eisenman (who here discusses his frustrations with liberals and the avant-garde).
PETER EISENMAN: That is correct.
CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER: I find that incomprehensible. I find it very irresponsible. I find it nutty. I feel sorry for the man. I also feel incredibly angry because he is fucking up the world.
Today, I'm going to tell you about the time my grandfather shot a man in the ass
Rockstar's open-world police procedural is set in 1947. Dad was born in 1943, and he spent his early years in Crenshaw, a district in the south-west of the city. (It's close to where the body of the Black Dahlia was found.) Best of all, his dad was a beat cop - a beat cop who, as we've already discovered, once shot a guilty man in the ass. The game world was the world of dad's childhood, then. Would he recognise it?
Strange New Worlds
Let's take another look at Chris Wayan's PLANETOCOPIA (previously): A series of detailed conceptions and paintings of vastly different Earths based on differing climates and land mass position. A planet designed to speed up East-West cvilization development! A life-bearing super hot world! An Earth with most of the seas missing! Forever Ice Age Earth!
High Weirdness By Mail
"I guess it started for me when, as a young sci-fi movie fan, I did a fanzine at age 12 to 15... that’s when I learned how relatively cheap and easy it was to self-publish, at least for a small circle of weirdos. Later, after comics went up to 50¢, I started collecting stuff equally weird but much cheaper than comic books: kook literature." - Rev. Ivan Stang
You may know of the Church of the SubGenius, that parody religion that worships the almighty "Bob" and was a fixture of MTV and Night Flights back in the day. But do you know of its SECRET ORIGINS? Co-founder Ivan Stang corresponded with hundreds of "mad prophets, crackpots, kooks & true visionaries," from sincere cults to winking charlatans to utter nutjobs to hate groups to independent artists and musicians, with some respected names thrown in, and synthesized them into a half-joking, half-serious celebration of the kook spirit. These days of course the forward-thinking crackpot looking for sheep goes directly to the internet. But while it lasted Stang and co-authors Mike Gunderloy, Waver Forest and Mark Johnston collaborated to document this vanished scene in the legendary book HIGH WEIRDNESS BY MAIL. (All links within may quickly lead someplace NSFW by the nature of the beast.)
You may know of the Church of the SubGenius, that parody religion that worships the almighty "Bob" and was a fixture of MTV and Night Flights back in the day. But do you know of its SECRET ORIGINS? Co-founder Ivan Stang corresponded with hundreds of "mad prophets, crackpots, kooks & true visionaries," from sincere cults to winking charlatans to utter nutjobs to hate groups to independent artists and musicians, with some respected names thrown in, and synthesized them into a half-joking, half-serious celebration of the kook spirit. These days of course the forward-thinking crackpot looking for sheep goes directly to the internet. But while it lasted Stang and co-authors Mike Gunderloy, Waver Forest and Mark Johnston collaborated to document this vanished scene in the legendary book HIGH WEIRDNESS BY MAIL. (All links within may quickly lead someplace NSFW by the nature of the beast.)
Fun with kinematics!
Racetrack is a game with very simple rules which nonetheless does a surprisingly good job of simulating the acceleration, braking, and handling of a race car. It can teach not only about inertia and kinematics, but also about optimal racing lines. Racetrack can be played with nothing more than a piece of graph paper and a pen, but there is also an online implementation called Vector Racer.
Just remember that you're still young
You're Gonna Make It Today: a reassuring message for these troubled times, delivered in the universal language of late 90's synthpop. [slyt]
USS - a portfolio of probabilities _02
"Sometimes students are good for a big surprise - as in this case. Having read one of my shorter posts (actually this one: www.hs-augsburg.de/~mstoll/?p=411 ) on a website about retro-futurism, Dennis Bille one day came around with a quite large set of folders and unpacked these wonderfull illustrations. Obviously they once were give-a-ways from "United States Steel International" to show, how the future might look like - from a early 60s perspective."
M.C. Escher vs Star Wars Lego
Star Wars Relativity V2
created by 16-year-old Paul Vermeesch, is a 1 foot cube Lego model of M.C. Escher's print Relativity, that also re-enacts the original Star Wars trilogy.
It's good to be curious
Garden of Your Mind:
Mister Rogers Remixed