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WELCOME TO THE WOOORLD OF TOMORROW

March 28, 1999: Futurama. It seems to go on and on forever. In fact, the pilot episode of the original run aired 25 years ago tonight, kicking off what would become one of the smartest and most hilarious comedies in TV history. So celebrate with an overview of character intros, ★ key scenes, clips, ♫ songs, and other links, why not?
posted by Rhaomi to MetaFilter at Mar-28-24 at 11:59 AM
favorite of vacapinta

They are risen

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence began in 1979 when a small group of gay men in San Francisco donned the habit of Catholic nuns, and used camp to subvert expectations & promote social and political change in San Francisco. Sacrilege or serious parody? Illicit joy or elicit compassionate apraxis? The Sisters have grown into an organization of queer joy with 65 houses in 10 countries. This Sunday Easter in the Park: Hunky Jesus and Foxy Mary Competition is set to attract 10,000+ attendants, but the works of a Sister is never done.
posted by rubatan to MetaFilter at Mar-28-24 at 9:51 AM
favorite of Kattullus

Exposed The true story of a lost documentary.


“Every day, there were fewer and fewer kings.”

The Achilles Trap doubles as a surprisingly sympathetic study of a man who, as his powers slipped away, spent the last decade of his life jerry-rigging monuments of his own magnificence. Coll draws much of his material from extensive interviews with retired American intelligence officers and former members of Saddam’s bureaucracy, as well as from a previously unavailable archive of audio tapes from Saddam’s own state offices. What emerges is a portrait of Saddam as an eccentric in the mold of G.K. Chesterton—if Chesterton were bloodthirsty, paranoid, and power-mad—a man driven ultimately by deep reverence for the sense that hides beneath nonsense. from Saddam’s Secret Weapon, a review of The Achilles Trap by Steve Coll [The American Conservative]
posted by chavenet to MetaFilter at Mar-28-24 at 1:42 AM
favorite of Kattullus

The Devil - a Life


A lot of the best Graeber has an “undeniable” quality

It has taken a little while and repeated readings for it to sink in, but I think that Graeber was reaching the point of rejecting, or at least severely (if implicitly) qualifying, almost all of these positions by late in his authorship. Particularly in On Kings (2017), his collaboration with his mentor Sahlins, and The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), co-written with the archeologist David Wengrow and completed just a couple of weeks before his death, Graeber’s politics grew more “mainstream” in a number of respects, even as his narrative of the origins of political authority and economic hierarchy remained fresh, radical, and richly documented, and even as his prose style retained all its charm. But perhaps LSE professorships, FSG book contracts, and the approval of the Financial Times have moderating or even co-opting effects after all. from What Happened to David Graeber? [LARB, ungated]
posted by chavenet to MetaFilter at Mar-27-24 at 12:41 AM
favorite of rory

A lot of the best Graeber has an “undeniable” quality

It has taken a little while and repeated readings for it to sink in, but I think that Graeber was reaching the point of rejecting, or at least severely (if implicitly) qualifying, almost all of these positions by late in his authorship. Particularly in On Kings (2017), his collaboration with his mentor Sahlins, and The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), co-written with the archeologist David Wengrow and completed just a couple of weeks before his death, Graeber’s politics grew more “mainstream” in a number of respects, even as his narrative of the origins of political authority and economic hierarchy remained fresh, radical, and richly documented, and even as his prose style retained all its charm. But perhaps LSE professorships, FSG book contracts, and the approval of the Financial Times have moderating or even co-opting effects after all. from What Happened to David Graeber? [LARB, ungated]
posted by chavenet to MetaFilter at Mar-27-24 at 12:41 AM
favorite of languagehat

“I don’t ask questions. I answer them.”

Who was Jack Lord. "When Jack Lord died, he left 40 million dollars to charities in Hawaii. There is Jack Lord's Special Memory of Elvis.' 'Stoney Burke' fan? Jack Lord has a collection of selected works. "This is a critical lesson for any young writer. We want our characters to be “real.” We want our heroes to be “relatable.” But characters are not real and heroes are not normal. They can’t be. If they were, they wouldn’t be heroes." 'The Jack Lord Rule'
posted by clavdivs to MetaFilter at Mar-25-24 at 10:44 PM
favorite of languagehat

A celebration of Paris café culture returns after more than a decade

Thousands of spectators gathered to watch more than 200 servers compete in Sunday's "Course des Cafés," the newly-revived version of a century-old race. Waiters and waitresses traversed a 1.2-mile loop starting and ending at City Hall, suited up in traditional crisp white shirts, black trousers, neatly tied aprons and in some cases, bow ties. They each carried a tray loaded with a croissant, a full water glass and an empty coffee cup.
posted by ActingTheGoat to MetaFilter at Mar-25-24 at 10:20 PM
favorite of languagehat

the wombles could not be reached for comment

Woman mistakes bobble for baby hedgehog and rushes it to Cheshire animal hospital. "Volunteer Danielle Peberdy, 36, said the kind-hearted woman had done the right thing in not ignoring a hedgehog out in the day. She said: "Hedgehogs shouldn't be out in the day so she did the right thing; the only problem was that it was a bobble.""
posted by fight or flight to MetaFilter at Mar-25-24 at 1:17 PM
favorite of languagehat

A Digital Twin Might Just Save Your Life

Equations are just a way of describing nature [...] Air is a fluid and blood is a fluid, so the same equations that model the air around an aircraft are the ones used to model the blood inside your body.” Joe Zadeh writes 6500 words for Noema magazine [via Arts & Letters Daily]
posted by cgc373 to MetaFilter at Mar-25-24 at 4:57 AM
favorite of rory

Ritual is part of my nature. I would call all of my pieces “rituals"

We hear from Budapest that the eminent composer Peter Eötvös died today. He was 80 and had endured a long illness. After an apprenticeship with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Eötvös emerged in the 1980s as a leading voice in late and post-modernism. Four of his operas were internationally premiered – Three Sisters at Lyon, Love and Other Demons at Glyndebourne, The Tragedy of the Devil at Munich and Sleepless (2021) in Berlin. His final opera Valuska, was premiered in Budapest on 2 December last year.
posted by chavenet to MetaFilter at Mar-24-24 at 2:07 PM
favorite of languagehat

This Was Village Life in Britain 3,000 Years Ago


It's spaceships all the way down

Need some mesmerization in your life? Gaze deep into Life Universe, a zoomable, infinitely-recursive Game of Life simulator [technical explanation]. Inspired by the classic video Life In Life and the OTCA Metapixel (previously). From shr, the developer behind Bubbles (previously), Blob (previously), and a wide variety of other fascinating and fun physics web toys.
posted by Rhaomi to MetaFilter at Mar-23-24 at 12:30 PM
favorite of Nelson

Couldn't find a '70s trucker song for this story

We attempted and succeeded in, as far as we know, the first ever wireless drive-by attack on a truck. In the paper Commercial Vehicle Electronic Logging Device Security: Unmasking the Risk of Truck-to-Truck Cyber Worms [PDF], researchers from Colorado State take over a transport truck and outline the risk of self-spreading fleet-wide infections. An article in Fleet Maintenance Magazine puts this risk in broader perspective.
posted by clawsoon to MetaFilter at Mar-23-24 at 5:39 AM
favorite of TheDonF

Closet logic

"I could watch Carrie and her pig blood, Pam on a hook in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I didn’t mind Seth Brundle spouting wings and pus, Regan MacNeil going from twelve-year-old girl to devil spawn. But when Tom gets bolder, when he transforms, I found it hard to stomach. I didn’t watch the movie again for years. Conceiving of Tom as only a murderer—sociopathic, obsessed platonically—I could ignore how queer he really is." from My Funny Valentine, an essay about The Talented Mr Ripley and realization by Michael Colbert
posted by chavenet to MetaFilter at Mar-23-24 at 2:20 AM
favorite of languagehat

The idea that it was mostly white guys was totally true

I don’t think it has anything to do with the audience for this stuff. I don’t think it has anything to do with the buzziness or the culture surrounding the site itself. I think it is just these money people coming in and making bad decisions. If they’re going to lay off people in Boeing and cut safety protocols or whatever, they’ll do it to anyone. from The Oral History of Pitchfork [Slate]
posted by chavenet to MetaFilter at Mar-22-24 at 1:45 AM
favorite of Kattullus

An Anarchist’s Guide To Dune

A long time ago in a place called Olympia, Washington… The Transmetropolitan Review places Frank Herbert’s Dune within the anarchist history of the Pacific Northwest.
posted by mbrubeck to MetaFilter at Mar-21-24 at 2:30 PM
favorite of jdroth

How to Draw Webcomics

Korean webtoon platform Bomtoon has made available a guide on creating webcomics as a series of 5 YouTube videos. Videos are in Korean with English subtitles.
posted by needled to MetaFilter at Mar-21-24 at 10:53 AM
favorite of jdroth

Like a grid, but for movies

moviegrid.io - "Select a movie for each cell using the clues that correspond to that cell's rows and columns... Each game, you have nine movie guesses to fill out the grid. Each movie, whether correct or incorrect, will count as one of your nine guesses. If a movie poster pops up, congratulations -- you got it right you little cinephile."
posted by quintessence to MetaFilter at Mar-21-24 at 6:30 AM
favorite of languagehat

In the realm beyond this one, my dad made sure I listened to Fishbone

By all accounts, my father was not a punk. Nothing about the clothes he wore made me think he was punk. I don’t know much about his music taste. He saved a Prince concert ticket in a childhood photo album along with CDs by the Fugees and KRS-One that I found with his other belongings, which also included lectures from Islamic scholars of the early ‘90s. From the books he left behind, I knew he was political and very pro-Black. I knew he converted to Islam when he was young and had an affinity for ‘90s clothing. He was stylish, but it wasn’t anything I could explicitly link to a subculture. Yet somehow, he found himself listening to a band called Fishbone. from Finding Portals: Fishbone’s “Fishbone” EP [Bandcamp]
posted by chavenet to MetaFilter at Mar-21-24 at 3:18 AM
favorite of languagehat

Sperm whales drop bubble of poo off WA to prevent orca attack

Sperm whales drop bubble of poo off WA to prevent orca attack in rarely recorded encounter. Observers look on in amazement as sperm whales off Western Australia's southern coast successfully defend themselves from a pod of attacking Orca by defecating at will, creating a cloud of diarrhoea.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries to MetaFilter at Mar-20-24 at 8:58 PM
favorite of languagehat

—You got the wrong guy, pal.

If Minute 9 is the first time we hear the names Deckard and Blade Runner, it’s also the first time we meet the plainclothes cop who will play a key role in LAPD surveillance of Deckard — and in the changed emphasis of four subsequent versions of Blade Runner released over the next twenty-five years. from Minute 9: Blade Runner [3 am magazine]
posted by chavenet to MetaFilter at Mar-20-24 at 3:59 PM
favorite of languagehat

—You got the wrong guy, pal.

If Minute 9 is the first time we hear the names Deckard and Blade Runner, it’s also the first time we meet the plainclothes cop who will play a key role in LAPD surveillance of Deckard — and in the changed emphasis of four subsequent versions of Blade Runner released over the next twenty-five years. from Minute 9: Blade Runner [3 am magazine]
posted by chavenet to MetaFilter at Mar-20-24 at 3:59 PM
favorite of Kattullus

Context Collapse and Face-Work


Relentlessly material

To get at the matter of the Cloud we must unravel the coils of coaxial cables, fiber optic tubes, cellular towers, air conditioners, power distribution units, transformers, water pipes, computer servers, and more. We must attend to its material flows of electricity, water, air, heat, metals, minerals, and rare earth elements that undergird our digital lives. In this way, the Cloud is not only material, but is also an ecological force. As it continues to expand, its environmental impact increases, even as the engineers, technicians, and executives behind its infrastructures strive to balance profitability with sustainability. Nowhere is this dilemma more visible than in the walls of the infrastructures where the content of the Cloud lives: the factory-libraries where data is stored and computational power is pooled to keep our cloud applications afloat. from The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud [MIT]
posted by chavenet to MetaFilter at Mar-20-24 at 1:44 AM
favorite of rory

Relentlessly material

To get at the matter of the Cloud we must unravel the coils of coaxial cables, fiber optic tubes, cellular towers, air conditioners, power distribution units, transformers, water pipes, computer servers, and more. We must attend to its material flows of electricity, water, air, heat, metals, minerals, and rare earth elements that undergird our digital lives. In this way, the Cloud is not only material, but is also an ecological force. As it continues to expand, its environmental impact increases, even as the engineers, technicians, and executives behind its infrastructures strive to balance profitability with sustainability. Nowhere is this dilemma more visible than in the walls of the infrastructures where the content of the Cloud lives: the factory-libraries where data is stored and computational power is pooled to keep our cloud applications afloat. from The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud [MIT]
posted by chavenet to MetaFilter at Mar-20-24 at 1:44 AM
favorite of languagehat

Reality has a surprising amount of detail

Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality. You can see this everywhere if you look. For example, you’ve probably had the experience of doing something for the first time, maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were. Then you got more practice and then you told yourself ‘man, it was so simple all along, I don’t know why I had so much trouble’. We run into a fundamental property of the universe and mistake it for a personal failing.
Blogger John Salvatier talks stair carpentry, boiling water, the difference between invisible and transparent detail, and how paying closer attention to the beguiling complexity of everyday life can help you open your mind and break out of mental ruts and blind spots.
posted by Rhaomi to MetaFilter at Mar-18-24 at 1:28 PM
favorite of rory

Everyone has an anecdote about García Márquez

I decided, last year, to turn on my recorder again and ask about these past ten years since Gabo died. As I’ve continued to follow his story, Gabo, always a prankster, continues to surprise. from Ten Years without Gabriel García Márquez: An Oral History [The Paris Review; ungated]
posted by chavenet to MetaFilter at Mar-18-24 at 2:30 AM
favorite of languagehat

Building an ancient robot from scratch with handtools

"Revisiting Greek Automata: Clockwork Robots from the Ancient World" is a video from @fraserbuilds, in which John Fraser makes one of 1st century Greco-Roman engineer Hero of Alexandria's self-driving cars self-propelled automata, with some help from a hand made blow-torch powered by olive oil and pit fired pottery.
posted by gwint to MetaFilter at Mar-17-24 at 2:05 PM
favorite of rory

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Favorite comments from mathowie's contacts
Displaying 1 through 30 comments

I hope this is not out of line to say, but I really hate the "dark forest" nonsense. It essentially legitimizes genocide. On the basis that some group may someday be a threat it is not only acceptable, but inescapably necessary to exterminate them. Any rational life, no matter how varied (presumably including us) will come to the same conclusion every time. It is an fine enough basis for a horror story, if you want some tentacled ghoulies out there eating up civilizations. But as an...
posted by The Manwich Horror to MetaFilter at Mar-25-24 at 9:34 AM
favorite of rory

. I walked his dogs. I was a dogwalker in lower Manhattan for 11 years and he was a client. I don't remember the doggos names but it was two labs, chocolate or black. Black I think. The loft was like a museum, immaculate and with plenty, but not to much, art. Certainly a sort of minimalist vibe. Very high ceilings, and some big metal art, his work I think, on at least one big brick wall...old fashioned freight elevator to get up there. It was in tribecca but just a few blocks north of...
posted by vrakatar to MetaFilter at Mar-28-24 at 7:10 PM
favorite of Kattullus

Looking Back at the Destruction of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, 30 Years Later: Hal Foster interviews Richard Serra and Clara Weyergraf-Serra....
posted by Gerald Bostock to MetaFilter at Mar-28-24 at 1:40 PM
favorite of Kattullus

Metafilter: it remains there to this day, having become grudgingly beloved....
posted by Crane Shot to MetaFilter at Mar-28-24 at 12:02 PM
favorite of Kattullus

Best commencement speech ever: https://post.thing.net/node/2064...
posted by web5.0 to MetaFilter at Mar-28-24 at 11:30 AM
favorite of Kattullus

I went to a Serra exhibit in NYC sometimes in the early 2000s with a friend, who about halfway through said something along the lines of, "This is all very interesting, but does it make you FEEL anything?" No, I thought, not really. But then we walked through a particularly massive sculpture that wheeled around in a maze, and upon reaching the center let out a kind of hiccup of laughter/surprise/pent-up emotion. Then we watched group after group reach the center and have more or...
posted by Transylvania Metro Android Castle to MetaFilter at Mar-28-24 at 11:09 AM
favorite of Kattullus

Are not my husband's feelings more important than whether or not John was hurt or disappointed by his behavior today? Well, ideally, yes. But we're messy humans and can't always be our best selves. Your job is not to find out whether YTA y/n but to figure out what's going on that has you spiralling over such a straightforward issue. Like, what's the pattern here? Just throwing it out there, do you tend to get into anxiety spirals over social interactions? Are you a people pleaser? What...
posted by Omnomnom to Ask MetaFilter at Mar-28-24 at 1:49 PM
favorite of amanda

(Irish) Republicanism was really a thing in the 70s and 80s in the US. There were a lot more pure-blood Irish-Americans and people living in mostly-Irish American enclaves and resentment of Irish protestants and the British was still strong. Discrimination by American Protestants against Catholic Irish Americans were recent living memories and that created a further kinship with northern Irish Catholics. There were small populations of Ulster political exiles living in Irish American...
posted by MattD to MetaFilter at Mar-28-24 at 9:33 AM
favorite of languagehat

It appears the IRA did see this as a propaganda film for their cause. The same way that today, Islamic terrorists publicize their violence to recruit new members from UK, Europe, Canada, the US, etc. The BBC reporting is focusing on the extraordinary behind the scenes footage of violence but it's implied there are many other parts of the video involving interviews with IRA members. Having them explain the purpose & the mission combined with visible proof of their actions & effects is...
posted by muddgirl to MetaFilter at Mar-28-24 at 9:29 AM
favorite of languagehat

Currently downloading a copy of "Metropolis" — a movie now in the public domain! — because I can't get screenshots in iTunes (or Amazon or Netflix or HBO or Criterion).

There is an upload of Metropolis on YouTube (and multiple versions on archive.org, if you need a particular restoration)....
posted by bcwinters to Ask MetaFilter at Mar-28-24 at 9:02 AM
favorite of jdroth

What repercussions are implied here? The British fear would have been that any US showing of the film became a major money-raising tool for the IRA. As it turned out, US support for the IRA already seemed to be fading by the time the film was complete, but why take the risk? The article suggests that this shift in sentiment was already well-advanced in the US by the time American networks were presented with an opportunity to show the film. In that new climate, you can see why they'd be...
posted by Paul Slade to MetaFilter at Mar-28-24 at 9:56 AM
favorite of Nelson

I worked at bodybuilding.com on and off between 2010 and 2015, and boy howdy was that a weird place. There was a 90 day get buff challenge for the employees, and when they succeeded they had a pro photo shoot where they got oiled up. And then those photos - big prints of them - were hung in the hallway. So every time I went to visit their office, I was treated to weird oily glamour shots of the people I worked with. Also, the first time I ever visited their office the kitchen was filled with...
posted by grumpybear69 to MetaFilter at Mar-28-24 at 6:16 AM
favorite of Kattullus

It appears the IRA did see this as a propaganda film for their cause. The same way that today, Islamic terrorists publicize their violence to recruit new members from UK, Europe, Canada, the US, etc. The BBC reporting is focusing on the extraordinary behind the scenes footage of violence but it's implied there are many other parts of the video involving interviews with IRA members. Having them explain the purpose & the mission combined with visible proof of their actions & effects is...
posted by muddgirl to MetaFilter at Mar-28-24 at 9:29 AM
favorite of Nelson

Just yesterday I was told about a minor ordeal in the Mario 64 speedrunning community. In one category, runners aren't measured by speed to complete the game but by number of A button presses. One runner claimed that they finished a level in 3.5 button presses. The half button press is because they press the A button down before the level starts and only release it after the level begins. Arguments broke out. Square wave graphs were drawn....
posted by AlSweigart to MetaFilter at Mar-28-24 at 4:22 AM
favorite of Kattullus

someone posted the "plane on a conveyor belt" question to a big FB group this morning and I got to enjoy it fresh all over again. the best bit is when the dads start angrily pulling out obscure plane facts to dig themselves deeper...
posted by Klipspringer to MetaFilter at Mar-28-24 at 12:40 AM
favorite of Kattullus

if this didn’t happen fifteen years ago i would think this is a classic example of “smooth sharking”. Probably on my mind as a friend pointed (no pun intended) me to this recent example (in which another friend participated to my great amusement)....
posted by supercres to MetaFilter at Mar-27-24 at 7:53 PM
favorite of Kattullus

Reminds me of my high school history teacher in ~1992, saying that he didn't believe the official Kennedy assassination story because it had LHO firing three shots in six seconds, which is only two seconds per shot. When I got older and learned about fencepost errors, I realized that it's three seconds per shot....
posted by Hatashran to MetaFilter at Mar-27-24 at 7:44 PM
favorite of Kattullus

The best way to prove this doesn't use the internet is to download & install MacWhisper, then turn off wifi and all other network connections. It'll transcribe just fine....
posted by Ampersand692 to Ask MetaFilter at Mar-26-24 at 11:15 AM
favorite of Mo Nickels

All I can think is "BREATHE OUT FOR WHAT?"...
posted by drewbage1847 to MetaFilter at Mar-27-24 at 9:20 AM
favorite of MexicanYenta

I was always taught never to say anything about the dead unless it’s good. He’s dead. Good!...
posted by kirkaracha to MetaFilter at Mar-27-24 at 5:40 PM
favorite of MexicanYenta

I walked most of the way across Santa Cruz in the evening after the Loma Prieta quake. There was no city electricity or gas but roughly once a block there was a group of neighbors holding a barbecue of what they expected to go bad in their respective freezers. Everyone had a radio on and we were hearing what happened in San Francisco and Oakland. We were all a bit on edge waiting for aftershocks, but people were fine in general. Undoubtedly there were some hardcore preppers who had...
posted by Tell Me No Lies to MetaFilter at Mar-27-24 at 1:28 PM
favorite of migurski

I will never run out of food because I've bought so many sardines in the vain hope that one day I'll eat them. Nobody's going to steal my sardines and I am so unexcited about eating them I'd probably forget about them and eat the cat's food first, or the cat. Or dirt. I wish I liked sardines, I really do. They're so good for you....
posted by Don Pepino to MetaFilter at Mar-27-24 at 12:48 PM
favorite of migurski

Thank you for doing this work, and for keeping us updated about your work (which is also work!)....
posted by samthemander to MetaTalk at Mar-27-24 at 10:59 AM
favorite of gac

I posted the fpp re: Huberman linked to above. At the time, the backlash was just beginning and was more focused on his support of supplements and presenting early stage research as established science than anything squicky about his personal life. Agreed that the fascist angle, while interesting, is a bit of a derail. It's very possible that Huberman presents in a certain way that shares some aspects with some fascists or perhaps hews to certain aesthetic principles that have been coopted by...
posted by sid to MetaFilter at Mar-27-24 at 12:42 PM
favorite of Nelson

What I got from The Dawn of Everything was that it was an attempt to ignite a sense of political possibility. The message was that people have always made conscious decisions that bring political systems into being. There's never been a "primitive man" who unconsciously drifted into inevitable, "natural" structures. Homo sapiens have always talked with each other about how their societies work, how other societies work, how they want society to work in the future. Nor...
posted by clawsoon to MetaFilter at Mar-27-24 at 6:14 AM
favorite of migurski

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