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Over the past 20 years, renowned illustrator John Burgoyne has produced more than 150 intricate, hand-drawn illustrations for Cook’s Illustrated magazine. In 1886, the US Government Commissioned 7,500 watercolor paintings of every known fruit in the world. Now, using materials from the USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection, you can make your own Cook's Illustrated poster! (Some assembly required.) 2019 OpenCulture article on the collection is here, with great examples and interesting context. My own fave, the pawpaw. [more inside]
posted by wenestvedt at 1:04 PM - 2 comments

Rose Christo's* infamous fanfic My Immortal has been covered on the Blue before, from the initial debates over intentionally bad fanfic, the Youtube adaptation, and the search for a definitive answer on its authorship. But somehow, until Scott Alexander came around, nobody had been brave enough to ask the real question: "Is My Immortal really an alchemical allegory?" *Maybe
posted by Navelgazer at 12:37 PM - 0 comments

Laura Kampf gives some Workshop Tips - Measuring, Marking & Math tips about how to avoid using math while making stuff.
posted by zengargoyle at 10:33 AM - 15 comments

This Lickable Screen Can Recreate Almost Any Taste or Flavor Without Eating Food (Gizmodo): "…The Norimaki Synthesizer takes a more aggressive approach through the use of five gels that trigger the five different tastes when they make contact with the human tongue. ¶The color-coded gels, made from agar formed in the shape of long tubes, use glycine to create the taste of sweet, citric acid for acidic, sodium chloride for salty, magnesium chloride for bitter, and glutamic sodium for savory umami. When the device is pressed against the tongue (Youtube), the user experiences all five tastes at the same time, but specific flavors are created by mixing those tastes in specific amounts and intensities, like the RGB pixels on a screen. To accomplish this, the prototype is wrapped in copper foil so that when it’s held in hand and touched to the surface of the tongue, it forms an electrical circuit through the human body, facilitating a technique known as electrophoresis." [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 9:55 AM - 32 comments

Both Michael Roth’s The Web Opera and HERE’s all decisions are made by consensus use our screen-mediated world as a narrative given.
posted by Etrigan at 6:54 AM - 2 comments

1985 was a ridiculously strong year for music releases. June 1, 1985 saw the release of Sting's first solo album The Dream Of The Blue Turtles [YT playlist]. It was inescapable for months, with massive hit singles. And it has Branford Marsalis on saxophone! Side A: If You Love Somebody Set Them Free [video], Love Is The Seventh Wave [video], Russians* [video], Chidren's Crusade, Shadows In The Rain [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 6:02 PM - 57 comments

It's been about four hundred years since the Imp Girls landed at Hot Lumpy Rock. Here's a map of what eventually became the Much Sass State. [avi: Orgy Pant Hobos]
posted by not_on_display at 5:26 PM - 17 comments

Leontyne Price is the legendary American soprano and the first African American to become a lead performer at the Metropolitan Opera. On Jan. 1st, 1985, at age 58, she sang her farewell performance on the Met Stage in the role of Verdi's Aida. In this highly emotional video from that night, she sings the iconic aria O Patria Mia and the audience responds with a rapturous applause. (slyt) [more inside]
posted by beisny at 4:46 PM - 7 comments

If you've walked past the corner of 7th Avenue South and Christopher Street in New York City, you might have noticed a little triangular mosaic in front of Village Cigars (Google streetview) that reads "Property of Hess Estate which has never been dedicated for public purposes ▽". This is the tiny "spite triangle" that marks a century-old grudge against New York City (Mentalfloss). At 500 square inches, it is the smallest piece of private property in the city (Atlas Obscura). Bonus: 10 NYC Streets from the Original Dutch Colonial Street Grid (Untapped Cities).
posted by filthy light thief at 3:43 PM - 12 comments

Artist Christo has died. He and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, created massive environmental installations. [more inside]
posted by theora55 at 3:00 PM - 65 comments

Centroid Towns is an anthology documentary project using photography, oral history interviews, and local archive research to study the twenty-five cities that have been the mean center of population of the United States. This symbolic center is calculated every ten years to accompany the U.S. Census, first located in 1790 near Chestertown, Maryland, and moving steadily westward, currently residing near Plato, Missouri. The project puts a face to statistical data, chronicling these towns and their inhabitants to illuminate the ongoing social and political transformation of America. [more inside]
posted by klausman at 10:22 AM - 2 comments

How RuneScape is helping Venezuelans survive [Runescape]

“Against this cataclysmic economic and societal backdrop, millions of people have fled the country in search of better lives, with many more desperately trying to find their own means of escape. In November 2019, the number of Venezuelan refugees and migrants reached 3 million. Those who remain in the country have been forced to find innovative ways to survive. While some craft bags out of worthless bolivars — Venezuelan currency — to sell at markets, others look to a virtual land of opportunity, spending hours in front of computer screens and mobile phones hunting green dragons* in the online multiplayer role-playing game RuneScape.”

*A quick and common way to earn vast amounts of RuneScape’s currency, gold, is to kill “Green Dragons.” Players can collect items dropped by the dragons and sell them on the in-game marketplace for “gold.” Then, this gold can be sold on third-party sites for money that works in the real world (often in the form of cryptocurrency like Bitcoin). [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:47 AM - 17 comments

Henry Cyril Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey (1875 – 1905), styled Lord Paget until 1880 and Earl of Uxbridge between 1880 and 1898, and nicknamed "Toppy", was a British peer who was notable during his short life for squandering his inheritance on a lavish social life and accumulating massive debts. Regarded as the "black sheep" of the family, he was dubbed "the dancing marquess" and for his Butterfly Dancing, taken from Loie Fuller, where a voluminous robe of transparent white silk would be waved like wings.
He inherited some £73m. But in the space of just over five years, he had blown the lot, been declared bankrupt, and died from complications of tuberculosis in Monte Carlo. Newspapers in March 1905 declared his death a "wasted life".
Paget's style has often been compared to that of Freddie Mercury.
(via)
Previously on M-F
posted by growabrain at 4:48 AM - 10 comments

During a week's break from A Daily Social Distancing Show, Trevor Noah has been thinking. He shares his thoughts in an 18 minute video, George Floyd, Minneapolis Protests, Ahmaud Arbery & Amy Cooper. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 5:58 PM - 49 comments

Maya Dukmasova has been writing about police abolitionist community organizing since 2016: "It’s easy to dismiss prison and police abolition as unrealistic and out of touch, but if one is seriously interested in figuring out how to keep communities safe while reducing violence and other crime, abolitionists offer a plethora of practical ideas. As many of them have pointed out to me over the years, prisons and police don’t do anything to make many neighborhoods safer and more stable, so here are some stories about other ways we could be using our time and resources." [more inside]
posted by Ouverture at 5:33 PM - 34 comments

"My all-time favorite map-based data visualization was created in 1944. Harold Fisk, working with the US Army Corp. of Engineers, mapped the length of the Mississippi River. What sets his visualization apart from others is that he maps the river through time, and manages to do so in a way that is both beautiful and surprisingly effective. I want to pay homage to his series of maps by creating my own system for procedurally generating maps of meandering rivers." With that, Robert Hodgin made Meander, a procedural system for generating historical maps of rivers (plus adjacent roadways and developments) that never existed. [via Mltshp]
posted by filthy light thief at 3:09 PM - 18 comments

Robert Evans, Bellingcat reporter, hosts the podcast Behind the Bastards. The formula is simple: Robert researches a terrible person (usually from recent history) and relates his research to a rotating cast of comedians who try to crack wise in the face of duplicity, misery, degradation, and death, while Producer Sophie tries to a) keep them on track adn b) stop Robert from wrecking the studio. [more inside]
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:54 PM - 37 comments

America's Never-Ending Battle Against Flesh-Eating Worms - "Inside the U.S. and Panama's long-running collaboration to rid an entire continent of a deadly disease." (thread/reader: "Screwworms were eradicated from the U.S. decades ago. But how? In the 1950s, the U.S. began growing millions of screwworms in a factory, sterilizing them with radiation, and dropping them out of planes. And this still happens today! Everyday!"; the USDA's screwworm eradication collection; merch/stickers; via)
posted by kliuless at 9:06 AM - 17 comments

BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz reads E.M. Forster's 1909 novella The Machine Stops. "The Machine Stops is not simply prescient; it is a jaw-droppingly, gob-smackingly, breath-takingly accurate literary description of lockdown life in 2020. [...] It's not lost on me that you are reading this on the internet on a man-made device over which we just about still believe we have mastery." [more inside]
posted by Major Clanger at 5:56 AM - 20 comments

Pelada (90 mins youtube) is a 2010 documentary/travelogue in which two American collegiate soccer players who couldn't make the leap to the professional level investigate the culture of pickup football around the world across 25 countries.
posted by juv3nal at 12:37 AM - 8 comments

A little new listening for your weekend: Indigo Girls have a new album out, Look Long. It's full of collaborators old and new. Here's the official YouTube playlist. Here are the lyrics at lifeblood.net. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 4:58 PM - 11 comments

Tony Goldmark has spent his quarantine time compiling a key archive of the ages: I figured out the precise chronological order of all the MCU movies (so far) BY SCENE. Start with the first three minutes and forty-five seconds of Thor: The Dark World, then switch over to 1:19:43-1:19:54 of Thor: Ragnarok, and a hundred and sixteen steps later (thanks to Goldmark going back to separate some of the time heist scenes), with all of Spider-Man: Far From Home, you will have Uatu'd the 23 MCU movies, hopping across all of reality to get the story in one kind-of-continuous narrative.
posted by Etrigan at 4:55 PM - 35 comments

We all know that our pets love us. They snuggle up to us when we’re cold. They cheer us up when we’re feeling down. And the looks that they sometimes give us can make our hearts melt—sometimes it seems like they’re looking straight into our souls. (SLBuzzFeed, h/t Miss Cellania)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:46 PM - 20 comments

Global deaths due to various causes and COVID-19 - a sobering data visualization that puts the pandemic in greater context
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 4:38 PM - 48 comments

Forty years ago a small group of activists formed Food Not Bombs during the Occupation Attempt of the Seabrook Nuclear Power Station. Since then, chapters of the organization (all-volunteer, always free, consensus based) have been serving reclaimed vegetarian food to those in need all over the world, frequently getting arrested for doing so. A planned anniversary celebration involving free outdoor concerts has been scuttled in favor of stepped up action to help feed those affected by illness and economic uncertainty. One of the founders reflects. [more inside]
posted by bq at 4:30 PM - 4 comments

Rediscovering The Small Web, by Parimal Satyal [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:18 PM - 30 comments

“I can’t think of anything I could have improved. I’m an old party-giver. To do something like this takes certain people to cooperate with one another. Nobody spilt any drinks. That’s unusual,” he says. “I spilled a lot of drinks in my time.” Bliss Broyard, daughter of Anatole Broyard, pens a lovely vignette about Vincent Livelli, who has lived a very full & fascinating life, and just turned 100.
posted by chavenet at 12:33 PM - 0 comments

YouTuber Curious Reviewers examines the top bathrooms in video games. [**WARNING: many of the clips depict nudity, violence, fecal subject matter.**]
posted by Fizz at 11:28 AM - 23 comments

Trump’s executive order against Twitter, targeting Section 230, is reminiscent the message boards and aggrieved trolls of the early 2000s. As Matt Haughey says: “Every bad thing at MetaFilter happened with someone who had been testing the rules for a year or two.”
posted by Revort at 11:27 AM - 62 comments

When indigenous peoples (IPs) have no information on the mining activity going on in their community, they are unable to hold others accountable for the use of their resources. They are denied the benefits of the mining activity even as they face major disruptions to their way of life and their environment. To address this, one organization has tried to explain the concepts of open data and mining governance to a community that hosts mining operations in Palawan province in the Philippines.
posted by Mrs Potato at 10:50 AM - 1 comment

Catherine Wood, owner-operator of Planetwood Productions in Los Angeles makes the case for maintaining recording credits. There is a good argument to be made that artists, particularly studio artists, lose out when recording credits disappear. Producers can't track studio bands as easily, and you the listener can't follow artists along their steps away from the studio to live performances and independent careers. [more inside]
posted by drossdragon at 10:42 AM - 13 comments

A sudoku based tribute to the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
posted by rollick at 10:14 AM - 19 comments

Tall Tales With Dwight Yoakam: An intimate night of conversation and tunes with the hard-charging, mile-a-minute pioneer of honky-tonk himself (GQ) [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 9:05 AM - 5 comments

While quarantine has its difficulties, it has also shown to be a great opportunity to catch up on media that one perhaps didn't have time for under a normal work/life schedule. With video games, the amount of time and money potentially invested, however, can leave a potential player asking a lot of questions beforehand, such as "Is it any good?" or "Is is appropriate for my kids?" but most importantly, "Can you violate the Geneva Conventions?"
posted by Navelgazer at 7:54 AM - 39 comments

In 1972 Al Green wrote and recorded Love and Happiness. The Reverend C.E. Hodges was manning the Hammond B-3 (previously). After the intro, listen for co-author and guitarist Teenie Hodges to set the tempo by tapping his foot on a cardboard box...
posted by jim in austin at 6:30 AM - 8 comments

Connected Coastlines is a nationwide reporting initiative on climate change and coastal states, hosted by the Pulitzer Center. [more inside]
posted by carter at 6:09 AM - 1 comment

Planting Trees Won't Stop Climate Change - "Not only are planted trees not the carbon sinks you want, but tree planting frequently ends up doing more harm than good." (*The Forest Unseen)
posted by kliuless at 12:48 AM - 33 comments

TreeTV is a five-hour video from Adult Swim of footage of trees and mellow music.
Created adjacent to Relaxing Old Footage With Joe Pera.
“Axolotl” by Julio Cortázar
posted by Going To Maine at 10:47 PM - 3 comments

“It’s a one-time shift in technology. After this, it’s going to stay like this forever,” says Saurabh Bajaj, CEO of Swiftlane, a Silicon Valley touchless startup using facial recognition. He says that Covid-19 had enabled technology to leapfrog into an immediate future of touchless elevators, doors, and trash cans. Our Economy Was Just Blasted Years Into the Future (Marker.Medium.com) More than interacting with the physical world at a distance, the article covers the increased focus on, and fights against facial recognition technology (STAT News), work-from-home becoming more widely adopted and supported (The Guardian), but researchers estimate that 42% of recent layoffs will result in permanent job loss (NBER). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 10:33 PM - 27 comments

T. Greg Doucette, regular member of #LawTwitter and Vic Migonga/Ty Beard commentator par excellence, gets asked what might we do to stop the takeover of the police and the judiciary by white supremacy. Greg replies with an epic 15 point thread.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 6:24 PM - 37 comments

The listing for this forest-encircled house in California includes some interesting photos. The reclusive resident generally keeps to herself, but trying to shift a property in these times means you have to put yourself out there.
posted by smoke at 6:23 PM - 22 comments

In February, the Canadian Museum of Nature asked Canadians to vote for their favourite lichen. Behold the star-tipped reindeer — Canadians' top pick for a national lichen. Watch Dr. Troy McMullin, lichenologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature, present the Star-tipped Reindeer Lichen as the top vote-getter from the national lichen vote. [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 5:12 PM - 12 comments

An oral history of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. (sli09).
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 4:55 PM - 22 comments

This Word Does Not Exist. Thomas Dimson, former Instagram engineer, and interpreter of emojis, brings us computer-generated plants, chemical technobabble, fashion trends, and more.
posted by CrunchyFrog at 4:51 PM - 7 comments

Lessons From Operation "Denver," the KGB’s Massive AIDS Disinformation Campaign: Historian Douglas Selvage talks about what the Russian government did in the 1980s to spread a conspiracy theory about the origins of HIV, and how that reverberates to the effects of misinformation campaigns currently promoted about the novel coronavirus
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:26 PM - 2 comments

A nothing short of triumphant stop motion renovation of an engine [SLYT]. LKW-Werksatt in Niederlauer, Germany, rebuilds a Mercedes Benz Actros OM471LAtruck engine.
posted by bouvin at 1:32 PM - 36 comments

Harry Lee Kassen at Comics Bookcase looks hard at the structure of layouts in The Wild Storm by Warren Ellis & Jon Davis-Hunt
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:55 PM - 5 comments

In a veritable firework display of digital self portraits, hundreds of quaint, embarrassing and dread-fully disturbing selfies were arranged in a unique short film composition. Single photos, artistically reworked, consolidate to form a ghastly grin that outshines the abyss of human existence. [Possibly NSFW]
posted by dobbs at 12:51 PM - 7 comments

Why now is the time to embrace video games for kids [CNN] “Before the pandemic, video games were a weekend-only activity in our house, allowed for one hour a day, Saturday and Sunday. It was a compromise that worked for our family. My 7-year-old had a chance to dig in to his favorite games, and we parents felt like we were putting reasonable limits on an activity about which we were somewhat ambivalent. But now he's playing them daily — and I wouldn't have it any other way. In this lonely pandemic world, we still want our kids to get together to play, and they do, too. Unlike us boring grown-ups, they don't get much out of chatting in group texts or through FaceTime (or even those work Zoom meetings). They want to enter collective imagined spaces and discover the elastic possibilities that await. Only there, somewhere deep in the unreal, are they likely to start exploring, creating and, importantly, connecting. Like most kids around the world, it's been a long time since my son has been able to battle bad guys, travel to faraway lands or rescue animals with his friends in person. But, thanks to video games, all is not lost.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 10:41 AM - 43 comments

Hello son, this is booking agent Bobby Romeo and I'm calling to offer your band Yo La Tengo an opportunity to open for the reunited Beatles! [more inside]
posted by carsonb at 10:23 AM - 10 comments