Favorites from Rhaomi
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Rick and Morty: Full Meta Jackrick
A brain wrinkler.
Civilization reboot: Imagine post-capitalism instead of the world's end
An Economic History of the ('Long') Twentieth Century
- "Slouching Towards Utopia is a rise-and-fall epic—but it is better at depicting the rise than explaining the fall."[1,2,3]
Road trip!
Let's take a drive in the country
Slow Roads is a casual, procedurally-generated driving game which lets you disconnect from life for a while and run endlessly toward the distant horizon. Set the scenery to suit your mood, throw on some music, andFrom the developer.
just drive.
Biomechanical horror adventure
H.R. Giger's biomechanical landscapes are a disturbing fusion of decaying flesh, bone and machinery. Slideshow. Animation. Inspired by his work, SCORN challenges you to explore and survive within these nightmarish visions. RPS. Full walkthrough. (CW: horror).
Divergence: Compute vs Capability
Jim Keller on AI Generated Software
- "It won't be that long until you start looking at all the software that has ten years of legacy in it and go 'Why would I want old software? Why wouldn't I want software that was generated this week?'. And there are a whole bunch of really interesting changes that come with that."[0,1]
I Have Nothing To Hide
A TikTok by Alex Falcone
Why does this 1909 portrait look contemporary?
A self portrait by Zinaida Serebriakova, painted in 1909, featured in this twitter thread today. Many people commented that it looks contemporary. Are there technical reasons why? Is it something specific to the composition, the palette, her facial features lining up with current tastes?
Speech-to-text with Whisper
Whisper, from OpenAI, is an open source tool you can run on your own computer that "approaches human level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition"; "Moreover, it enables transcription in multiple languages, as well as translation from those languages into English." Instructions on how to download, install, and run it. (I have successfully used Whisper and the results were very good. However, it is not fast enough to run during recording of an interview and give you live captions/transcripts; it runs after the fact, on already-recorded audio.)
Andor: The Eye
With cover from a spectacular local festival, the Aldhani mission reaches a point of no return.
For a solid decade, Rod McKuen was the most sincere man in America.
“As a teenage boy, I felt sad about lots of things,” McCloud told me. “Life seemed to be sad. And by George, Rod McKuen was sad too, and we could be sad together.”
Rod McKuen sold millions of poetry books in the 1960s and 1970s. He was a regular on late-night TV. He released dozens of albums, wrote songs for Sinatra, and was nominated for two Oscars. He was a flashpoint in the battle between highbrow and lowbrow, with devotees revering his plain-spoken honesty and Dick Cavett mockingly calling him “the most understood poet in America.” Every year on his birthday, he sold out Carnegie Hall.
But by the time I was a teenager, he had completely vanished from the cultural landscape.
- By Dan Kois, Slate Magazine
Advertising a text based website in 2023
I made a TikTok about the user sponsored Metafilter post that Jessamyn created from my suggestion and I'm posting it here in new thread to help spur ideas about putting this text based website on modern day social media.
“[F]or parody to work, it has to plausibly mimic the original.”
Anthony Novak made a parody facebook page of the City of Parma’s police department.
The cops arrested him, charged him with a felony, and lost. Novak sued the cops for ignoring that his site was a parody. He lost his case. He appealed to the sixth circuit and lost again.. Now, it’s on the docket for this Supreme Court term.
Most importantly (to me), The Onion has filed an amicus brief in support of Novak that jokes around but makes a serious argument.
The cops arrested him, charged him with a felony, and lost. Novak sued the cops for ignoring that his site was a parody. He lost his case. He appealed to the sixth circuit and lost again.. Now, it’s on the docket for this Supreme Court term.
Most importantly (to me), The Onion has filed an amicus brief in support of Novak that jokes around but makes a serious argument.
Movie: Men in Black
After a police chase with an otherworldly being, a New York City cop is recruited as an agent in a top-secret organization established to monitor and police alien activity on Earth: the Men in Black.
The World We’re Losing by Larissa Diakiw
The first time I saw these swaths of burnt-pumpkin, dead forest, I felt a pain in my chest, though I will admit that I still hadn’t accepted or allowed myself to reveal this to others, consider it legitimate, or let myself feel it, so it became a stunted obscure pain. A pain I considered immature, juvenile, weak. This is the first time I can remember my own eco-grief. An elastic tight feeling inside my chest. I will always equate the orange colour of dead pine needles with the colour of death.
Movie: Bullet Train
Unlucky assassin Ladybug is determined to do his job peacefully after one too many gigs gone off the rails. Fate, however, may have other plans, as Ladybug's latest mission puts him on a collision course with lethal adversaries from around the globe--all with connected, yet conflicting, objectives--on the world's fastest train.
Twenty years of Languagehat
A slightly belated congratulations to MeFi's own Languagehat, AKA Stephen Dodson, on the twentieth anniversary (July 31) of his blog Languagehat.com. Languagehat explores linguistics, with excursions into literature (especially Russian literature), grammar, etymology, languages and more. I venture to guess that exceedingly few blogs launched in 2002 are still active, and perhaps none active to the degree that Languagehat has been, with posts on a daily basis virtually all of those twenty years.
Arguably the single most influential public intellectual alive today
The analysis and importance of Wang Huning.
The New Yorker profiles Wang Huning (王沪宁), an influential Chinese political thinker, member of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo's Standing Committee, and author of a 1991 book about America.
Steering Committee Check-In: October 2022
The MetaFilter Steering Committee is excited to bring you the first Steering Committee Check-In! Inside we have some updates on what we’ve done in the past month, what we’re working on this month, and a request for input from the community.
Andor: Reckoning
Cassian's desperation to avoid arrest leads him to a mysterious man with unknown connections.
Movie: The Wizard of Oz
Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl (Judy Garland) kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.
Rick and Morty: Rick: A Mort Well Lived
Roy's our boy, broh.
Movie: Trollhunter
A group of students investigates a series of mysterious bear killings, but learns that there are much more dangerous things going on. They start to follow a mysterious hunter, learning that he is actually a troll hunter. A Norwegian mockumentary with an appropriate level of creeping dread, but one that also benefits from generous helpings of dry wit.
email [deprecated]
Carlos Fenollosa has given up on self hosting email after 20 years. You might recognize Fenollosa from his handy list of Unix tricks. His argues that even emails from SDF don't work, noting that he's "positive that the beards of their admins are grayer than (his) and they will have tried to tweak every nook and cranny available."
Of course the SDF (previously) is older than the actual web and so old it refers to ARPANET emails.
Give your ears a sonic vacation
The US National Park Service has a few high quality recorded soundscapes from Rocky Mountain National Park.
Put on your headphones, close your eyes, and take a little trip to the country.
That ‘Deaf Child in Area’ Is Now a Deaf Adult — and He’s Hot!!!
The Squeaky Wheel: your top news source for disabled people, by disabled people.
The alphabet, animated, one letter at a time
Mike Salcedo decided to try and animate one thing a day. So he chose the alphabet. It got somewhat out of hand.
"Why does that mushroom sound like Strong Bad?"
How long has it been since we had a Flash Friday?
The Mellow Mushroom is a chain of pizza restaurants based and primarily set in the U.S. state of Georgia. What else is owned and operated in Georgia? Homestar Runner! Back in 2001 these two semiagrarian planets shared an orbit for a time: the Brothers Chaps made a website for Mellow Mushroom that will look and sound very familiar to fans of Strong Bad and friends. The site changed design in 2007, but the Chaps' version is still hosted on the company's website, and although Flash is dead, if you install the Ruffle browser extension you can see the site largely as it existed back when it was active. More information is on the Homestar Runner Wiki.
The Mellow Mushroom is a chain of pizza restaurants based and primarily set in the U.S. state of Georgia. What else is owned and operated in Georgia? Homestar Runner! Back in 2001 these two semiagrarian planets shared an orbit for a time: the Brothers Chaps made a website for Mellow Mushroom that will look and sound very familiar to fans of Strong Bad and friends. The site changed design in 2007, but the Chaps' version is still hosted on the company's website, and although Flash is dead, if you install the Ruffle browser extension you can see the site largely as it existed back when it was active. More information is on the Homestar Runner Wiki.
Using song lyrics as AI image prompts
SolarProphet
is a youtube creator who's recently been on a kick of "[song] but every lyric is an AI generated image". A fun example of human creativity with AI images. ("Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny" is possibly my favourite.)
SLYTChannel.
Hidden Object Game!
Long long ago, before the search for things buried in images proliferated on mobile platforms, there was this classic early example. A true test of your observation skills, it will keep you going for some time. The editor of this image has cleverly hidden within it a can of Spam. Can you find it? It has stymied tens of thousands of searchers for over twenty years. Good luck to you, internet user, and find that spam!
Predatory Givers
RIP buys the debts just like any other collection company would — except instead of trying to profit, they send out notices to consumers saying that their debt has been cleared. To date, RIP has purchased $6.7 billion in unpaid debt and relieved 3.6 million people of debt. The group says retiring $100 in debt costs an average of $1. from This group's wiped out $6.7 billion in medical debt, and it's just getting started [NPR]
I want to go to there
Michael Heizer’s City, a 1.5 mile x 0.5 mile monumental artwork in the Nevada Desert is finally open for visitors in September. Write for an invite! Benjamin Sutton has a brief story in The Art Newspaper, and Michael Kimmelman, Todd Heisler, and Noah Throop have a deep dive at The New York Times. (No paywall)
Top of the Charts in 1400 BCE
Want to hear (a version of) the world's oldest known complete song?
Germanic-Nordic experimental folk collective Heilung have recorded a version of the Hymn to Nikkal, a paean to the Moon Goddess Nikkal which is the only complete piece among the 3,400-year-old Hurrian Songs. The songs were inscribed with both words and musical notation in cuneiform on clay tablets, and were excavated from the ancient Amorite-Canaanite city of Ugarit in northern Syria. Vocalist Maria Franz says "The rhythm in that text is just so weird; it’s so alien. I’ve never heard anything like it.”
It’s the future now, and everything cool on the internet is about God
At the heart of all this motion is a lust for crawling through someone else’s ambiguity, in staring at a post or profile for longer than the machine’s trained you to, in the toothsome frustration of trying to figure out what’s a revelation, what’s a dark joke, and what’s just the result of a chemically imbalanced brain and an eternally available keyboard. […] You can’t really make a name for yourself as an authenticity-poster and then pivot to posting unhinged textsprawls. Well, you probably can, and people probably will as this type of online life drips into the mainstream, but it will be in mimetic microdoses.— Intimacy and the Machine: Godposting – or: New Internet Esotericism, by Biz Sherbert (Sept 2021)
It's time to talk about where Cabbage Patch Dolls come from
On Twitter, Sarah Baird describes a visit to where Cabbage Patch Dolls are "born." (Wayback Machine) It’s adorable, terrifying, and bonkers!
Hank Green Explains the Climate Bill
"This is a big problem, that no one person understands all of. But in this video you're going to go from understanding more than like, 80 or 90% of people, to understanding this more than 99% of people. And it's only going to take you like 15 minutes". (SLYT 22:23)
Common Markdown, a robust and standardized subset of Markdown
An old thing, but a good thing.
CommonMark [is a] strongly defined, highly compatible specification of Markdown[, …] a plain text format for writing structured documents, based on formatting conventions from email and usenet… the following sites and projects have adopted CommonMark: Discourse, GitHub, GitLab, Reddit, Qt, Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange, Swift (Markdown for MeFi)
Reference Card and Interactive Tutorial
CommonMark [is a] strongly defined, highly compatible specification of Markdown[, …] a plain text format for writing structured documents, based on formatting conventions from email and usenet… the following sites and projects have adopted CommonMark: Discourse, GitHub, GitLab, Reddit, Qt, Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange, Swift (Markdown for MeFi)
Reference Card and Interactive Tutorial
“We need to take away their children”
A deeply reported story about the Trump Administration’s policy of separating immigrants illegally crossing the border from their children.
SL Atlantic story delving into the drivers, mistakes, intentions, and lies comprising the Trump Administration’s policy of taking children from immigrants crossing the border, regardless of whether the parent legally requested asylum or crossed outside of a port or legal crossing location.
The policy was planned and implemented by “Hawks” who needed to shut out the “squishies” and “bleeding hearts” in the bureaucracy so that the policy could be implemented without planning or concern for the impact on the victims or on other departments who would be blindsided with having to deal with the resulting separated parents and children.
It is not down in any map
Notable people shows an interactive globe of most notable person born in locations around the world (for some values of "notable").