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A far-ranging interview between author Nicola Griffith and audiobook narrator Pearl Hewitt on the craft. A warm and thoughtful discussion ranging from the technical details of voice exercises and DIY recording to homesickness and place names and building careers. Hewitt narrated award-winning Hild, a fantastical history of St Hilda of Whitby, and her upcoming sequel Menewood.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 7:16 PM - 0 comments

The Museum of Everyday Life is an ongoing revolutionary museum experiment based in Glover, Vermont. Its mission is a heroic, slow-motion cataloguing of the quotidian–a detailed, theatrical expression of gratitude and love for the minuscule and unglamorous experience of daily life in all its forms. [more inside]
posted by zeptoweasel at 4:42 PM - 4 comments

Agma Schwa's second Cursed Conlang Circus is on YouTube! For those who enjoy a good conlang, these are bad ones -- or rather, fantastically difficult and strange ones -- to enjoy even more. Although the links are to YT videos that take some time to watch, you can consult the transcripts or use chapters for quick looks.
Check out the marvelously alien Gurgle, created for a race of hexapods with a central orifice and beak. Or the ridiculous Douleur ("ultraFrench") with its six genders, including insectile and piratical. Tired of noise? Say it with rocks instead, using Geolaŋ, one of the few languages that requires knowledge of local land use regulations.
[more inside]
posted by Countess Elena at 12:09 PM - 3 comments

“Good Morning sings with an insistent, subtle intelligence. It asks after the origin and purpose of language and suggests that the degree zero of speech is laughter, which is where the farts come in.”
posted by oulipian at 8:58 AM - 4 comments

The TikTok account, conversations with victims, and TikTok’s own lack of action on the account show that access to facial recognition technology, combined with a cultural belief that anything public is fair game to exploit for clout, now means that all it takes is one random person on the internet to target you and lead a crowd in your direction. from The End of Privacy is a Taylor Swift Fan TikTok Account Armed with Facial Recognition Tech
posted by chavenet at 4:50 AM - 44 comments

Todd in the Shadows uploads a 33 minute 'DELUXE' of his Songs That Stop on the Word "Stop" Supercut compilation (original compilation he posted back in 2015) (previously)
posted by Pachylad at 2:05 AM - 15 comments

A BBC audio drama adaptation of Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler featuring Toby Jones, Indira Varma & Tim Crouch. (NB: it says it's only available for 24 days)
posted by juv3nal at 1:33 AM - 13 comments

What's Cyriak done this time? Seriously, what has he done. As always, I'm looking right at it and I don't know what it is. All I know is that it's a video about a goose and it's called HONK. (post title source, previously) [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 12:41 AM - 9 comments

We need urban trees more than ever: here's how to save them from extreme heat
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:28 PM - 8 comments

The city is seeing rainfall patterns that look more like Miami’s or even Singapore’s The city flooded last December, last April, and last July—an unusual seasonal span.
posted by folklore724 at 10:16 PM - 40 comments

Benito’s 50 New Streaming Spookums for Halloween 2023 - it’s spooky season so Benito Cereno has another list of streaming movies. It’s the good shit, check it out.
posted by Artw at 4:16 PM - 10 comments

Are you ageist? Take a 10-minute implicit bias test and find out. Work against ageism. It's good for you, it's good for society. [more inside]
posted by aniola at 11:12 AM - 116 comments

to help save Florida’s dying reef. Not all heroes wear capes. Some are crabs. Benji Jones for Vox.
posted by Hypatia at 7:00 AM - 47 comments

“We went from two women senators when I ran for office in 1992 to 24 today – and I know that number will keep climbing.” Dianne Feinstein, whose three decades in the Senate made her the longest-serving female US senator in history, has died. [CNN]
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 6:25 AM - 176 comments

Making Dazed [45m] is a 2005 reunion/behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of the 1993 film Dazed And Confused. Ben Affleck, Matthew McConaughey, Parker Posey, Adam Goldberg, and more look back at the film that helped launch their careers.
posted by hippybear at 5:57 AM - 20 comments

BANDCAMP Acquired By SONGTRADR as Epic Games Sells Bandcamp Amid Layoffs [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 4:44 AM - 66 comments

"By me, Richard Heege, because I was at that feast and did not have a drink." [more inside]
posted by brundlefly at 12:30 AM - 19 comments

Aphex Twin's Xtal, but done with human voice
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:14 AM - 7 comments

A farmer set a trap to catch whatever was killing his chooks. He caught a tiger quoll (marsupial carnivore that reaches up to 3.5 kilograms/7.7 pounds) that had been thought to be extinct in South Australia for 130 years. When farmer Pao Ling Tsai set a trap to catch the predator that had been killing his chooks, he expected to catch a feral cat or fox. Instead, he caught a species that was thought extinct in South Australia more than 130 years ago. The quoll has now been vet checked, had DNA samples taken, treated for mange, and will be released into the wild.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:21 PM - 22 comments

Sitting is the opposite of standing. Sitting is the opposite of running around. Sitting is a wonderful thing to do. On September 10 2023, an earworm was born. [more inside]
posted by doift at 7:25 PM - 11 comments

(double link youtube) Noodle explains why applying smoothing and interpolation to animation ruins it. Just for good measure Knowing Better explains why you don't see in 4K. Some NSFW language
posted by es_de_bah at 7:02 PM - 22 comments

16-year-old boy arrested after famous tree ‘deliberately felled’ A famous tree that has stood sentinel on Britain’s Roman-built Hadrian’s Wall for more than 200 years has been “deliberately felled” in what authorities have called an “act of vandalism.” The sycamore tree, located in the Northumberland National Park in northern England, was made famous to millions around the world when it appeared in Kevin Costner’s 1991 blockbuster film “Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves.”
posted by Fizz at 4:04 PM - 119 comments

You just did the most legally significant thing you're ever gonna do other than die, and no one has explained any of it to you (SLYT). An interview with James Sexton: a divorce attorney's thoughts on love and marriage. "We are biological creatures, living in medieval institutions, with god-like technology. How do you think that ends?" [more inside]
posted by kanuck at 3:09 PM - 21 comments

It is time for the 2023 Fat Bear Week, the annual clash of tubby titans in Alaska's Katmai National Park, to see whose ursine heft reigns supreme. This year's Fat Bear Week kicks off with the Fat Bear Junior contest, whose winner gets to join the main bracket. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:51 PM - 21 comments

Meet the Catluminati (archive) and his neighborhood cat friends including Mr. Furley, Naptime, Miss Cleo, Toast Malone, Crazy, Walnut, Cow Mary, Area Rug Mary, and Clara von Teethandclaws to name a few. More on the Catluminati. Videos on youtube, tiktok, instagram. [more inside]
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 10:15 AM - 10 comments

2023 was the 80th anniversary of the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles. The name is misleading because it suggests that the zoot suiters — the young Mexican, Black and Filipino men and boys who wore the flamboyant outfits (wide-legged, high-waisted, pegged trousers and coats with wide lapels and padded shoulders; zoot suit girls had their own spin)— were the perpetrators. Text and post title from the timeline (archive.org version). Short video: The Zoot Suit Riots Cruise brings back ‘a forgotten era’. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 9:36 AM - 13 comments

Inside the secret meeting of Vine stars that ushered in the app’s demise (WaPo gift link)
posted by kyleg at 7:56 AM - 38 comments

Here is a non-exhaustive list of things that have been blamed for nearsightedness: pregnancy, pipe smoking, brown hair, long heads, bulging eyes, too much fluid in the eyes, not enough fluid in the eyes, muscle spasms, social class. From The World Is Going Blind. Taiwan Offers a Warning, and a Cure [Wired; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 4:42 AM - 46 comments

Gold Ornaments & Precious Stones Adorn Tender Portraits by Tawny Chatmon. More art by Tawny Chatmon at this link. "Often centering her portraiture on adolescents, Chatmon is visionary, imagining a time when children are living in peace, being safe, being protected, being free of stereotypes, living freely and joyously, being treated gently by the world. This dream is rooted in a long-held desire for young Black people to be recognized as inherently valuable and significant, visualized through the artist’s signature glimmering embellishments."
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:11 PM - 7 comments

Back in the spring of 2022, professor of linguistics David Pesetsky was talking to an undergraduate class about relative clauses… Before long a student, Kanoe Evile ’23, raised her hand. “How does this account for the ‘whom of which’ construction?” Evile asked. Pesetsky, who has been teaching linguistics at MIT since 1988, had never encountered the phrase “whom of which” before. “I thought, ‘What?’” Pesetsky recalls. [more inside]
posted by Horace Rumpole at 5:29 PM - 124 comments

US surgeons are killing themselves at an alarming rate. One decided to speak out “I was the top junior tennis player in the United States,” she began. “I am an associate professor of surgery at Harvard.
“But I am also human. I am a person with lifelong depression, anxiety, and now a substance use disorder.”
The room fell silent.
posted by dfm500 at 4:54 PM - 37 comments

Again and again, we search for the moderate streak in the extremist, tell ourselves we can find common ground with people who are explicit in their desire to do us harm.
posted by bq at 1:32 PM - 21 comments

Consider the impact of bad management: Having a bad manager at the helm of a team can mean employees don’t have clear goals, or they have the wrong goals, or there are no checks in place to monitor progress against those goals. It can mean people don’t hear what they’re doing well or where they need to improve. It can mean problems fester, initiative is snuffed out, strong workers aren’t retained, and poor performers stick around for years while the good ones are driven off. So given how important good management can be, why are so few managers trained well? Ask a Manager's Alison Green tackles the question for Slate.
posted by sciatrix at 1:02 PM - 69 comments

Chants of Sennaar [Launch Trailer] “Chants of Sennaar is a language-based puzzle game based on the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. In this retelling, your character makes their way through five floors of a tower, each of which is home to a different community with a different language. Using a pictorial journal, you assign every word you find to a picture, slowly piecing together each language as you go. You use the words you learn to solve other puzzles, navigate the tower, and understand what others are saying. All this is made possible through decoding language — and I can’t overstate how fun the process is.” [via: Polygon]
posted by Fizz at 9:52 AM - 20 comments

Nothing Is Better Than This: The Oral History of ‘Stop Making Sense’

This stuff does make you scratch your head. Why choose this? And it’s just sort of like, “Well, it doesn’t matter, does it? It’s just part of the entertainment factor.”

[more inside]
posted by kirkaracha at 9:31 AM - 33 comments

One of the most famous photographers of whom you may not have heard -- but whose work you likely have seen -- Henry Diltz, is being honored with a lifetime achievement award. Diltz has shot more than 250 album covers and thousands of publicity shots in the ‘60s and ‘70s. [more inside]
posted by terrapin at 9:07 AM - 9 comments

Dropout is celebrating its fifth anniversary. Dropout, a streaming service born from the ashes of CollegeHumor, is dropping the CH brand altogether; its CEO, Sam Reich, talked about the site's indie rebirth on Vulture and on Polygon, the latter alongside Dropout's resident dungeon master and socialist folk hero, Brennan Lee Mulligan. Apart from the channel's Dimension 20 D&D series (sample episode here), Dropout is best known for the improv-heavy game show Game Changer, in which players imitate mac and cheese, combat unruly lie detectors, improvise full musicals, harsh the vibes, name birds, and generally cause undue amounts of chaos. (Several full episodes are available here.)
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 6:47 AM - 26 comments

But there was a darker side to his innovation. What it meant in practice was that rather than burrowing into a mountain, following a rich seam of ore deep into the earth, miners would now essentially demolish the entire mountain to extract its metal. This was not just mass production, but ‘mass destruction’. from The Discovery of Copper
posted by chavenet at 4:41 AM - 18 comments

A jargon-free explanation of how AI large language models work - "Want to really understand large language models? Here's a gentle primer." [link-heavy FPP!] [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 11:59 PM - 28 comments

WGA writers union reaches agreement to end strike vs Hollywood studios "The Negotiating Committee, the WGAW Board and WGAE Council all voted unanimously to recommend the agreement. It will now go to both guilds’ memberships for a ratification vote." WGA's updated chart comparing what the studios offered on May 1st to what the writers got after their 148-day strike [PDF], including writers room protections, streaming residuals based on actual viewership numbers, and more. [more inside]
posted by mediareport at 10:31 PM - 63 comments

Google Podcasts is shutting down Google just announced that it is shutting down Google Podcasts in 2024, despite having been installed more than 500 million times since its 2018 launch. They are encouraging users to switch to YouTube music instead.
posted by mijustin at 9:39 PM - 50 comments

A story, in cartoon form, about how doctors dismiss women's physical pain.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:31 PM - 33 comments

Sixty-two Films That Shaped the Art of Documentary Filmmaking by Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 14 Oct 2020.
posted by Westringia F. at 7:36 PM - 17 comments

TikTok, emojis and anime now as physical body language. Touching fingers, silently screaming into your hand, the Bella Swan hair tuck—each of these internet mannerisms all require a grossly exaggerated performance.
posted by spamandkimchi at 7:08 PM - 18 comments

Apparently back in 1975, Graham Chapman of Monty Python and Douglas Adams not quite yet of Hitchhiker's Guide wrote a television show. It's an incomprehensible mess that's entirely worth watching. Out Of The Trees [32m]
posted by hippybear at 11:43 AM - 25 comments

The US Federal Trade Commission and more than a dozen state attorneys general have filed a sweeping antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, alleging that the e-commerce giant has unlawfully leveraged its market dominance to stamp out would-be competitors.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:55 AM - 38 comments

A precious object finds its way home.
posted by bq at 9:44 AM - 2 comments

Canada’s House speaker Anthony Rota sorry for honoring Nazi veteran [Washington Post] The speaker of Canada’s House of Commons has apologized for celebrating a man who served in a notorious Nazi military unit during World War II. Speaker Anthony Rota introduced 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka of North Bay, Ontario, to fellow lawmakers on Friday during Ukrainian President Volodymyr’s visit to Parliament. After Zelensky addressed the body, thanking Canada for supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia and urging it to stay committed, Rota pointed out Hunka and described him as a war hero “who fought [for] Ukrainian independence against the Russians, and continues to support the troops today.” But on Sunday, Jewish groups condemned the honor, saying Hunka had been a member of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division, a Waffen-SS unit composed of ethnic Ukrainians. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:14 AM - 178 comments

Anytime a company lays someone off, there’s a possibility the person will take something with them. Coke, holder of the world’s most famous trade secret, was particularly attuned to that risk. It had an intelligence-bureau-style classification scheme, like other corporations that deal in proprietary information, and it had software that tracked employees’ data use. That summer, as more and more employees learned they were leaving, the data loss prevention system began to ripple with alerts. from The Plot to Steal the Other Secret Inside a Can of Coca-Cola [Bloomberg; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 4:07 AM - 46 comments

Ever read Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince? Turns out you are not alone. It has been translated into 500+ different languages and dialects, including Irish - see above. Swiss engineering entrepreneur Jean-Marc Probst has, over the last 40 years, collected most of them, and a mass [N = 9,000+] of ancillary material, into one searchable place. Ten minute overview from lingthusiast imshawn getoffmylawn.
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:47 AM - 12 comments