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The neo-modernist faith in the future assumes the potentiality of the not-yet as an ideal; it credulously takes the bait of hype, assuming that technological innovation will continue to produce new aesthetic paradigms, and ideally market value. These cycles of hype go from boom to bust with predictable regularity—see, for instance, the spectacular death of NFTs—but to the believers, individual fads matter less than the stubborn insistence on the importance of each of them, which is unsurprising when you consider that every one of the faithful might also be a profiteer. from Gimmicks of Future Past [The Baffler; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 12:40 AM - 4 comments

Malicious data sharing to be outlawed in Australia as part of privacy law update. The malicious release of personal data online, known as doxxing, will be outlawed and attract up to seven years in jail under new legislation being introduced to Federal parliament. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:46 PM - 3 comments

With recipes, trivia, history, cooking tips, poems and an extensive listing of festivals by US state, country and month, Chef James' 25-year-old, daily-updated foodreference.com is a comforting survival from the early web. (Previously [2002], pointed out by Brian Jeffears on Mastodon) [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 1:59 PM - 4 comments

Scientists have argued that recursion, a technique that allows chunks of language such as sentences to be embedded inside each other (with no hard limit on the number of nestings) is a universal human ability, perhaps even the one uniquely human ability that supports language. It’s what allows us to create—literally—an infinite variety of novel sentences out of a limited inventory of words. from The Rise and Fall of the English Sentence [Nautilus; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 1:27 PM - 8 comments

"Candy came from out on the Island / In the back room she was everybody's darling" Beautiful Darling [1h26m] is a documentary about the life of Andy Warhol Factory participant Candy Darling. You've heard the lyric, but probably don't know the story.
posted by hippybear at 12:22 PM - 2 comments

On his YouTube channel stand-up comic Josh Johnson has released nearly a full day’s worth of stand-up videos. They are generally topical routines, so it might make sense to start with the latest one, about the Harris-Trump debate. In a couple of recent interviews, with Vulture and the Los Angeles Times, Johnson explains why the Daily Show writer and correspondent decided to start releasing his material immediately.
posted by Kattullus at 9:07 AM - 22 comments

The whale disassemblers are coming. An hour long documentary on the process of moving the contents of a natural history museum that have been in place, in some cases, for almost 200 years. SLYT
posted by mygothlaundry at 8:53 AM - 8 comments

The 2024 Ringo Awards were announced last night at the Baltimore ComicCon. [more inside]
posted by CMcG at 8:13 AM - 8 comments

"It was a special thing for me to experience that outpouring of grief. It showed the true impact he had on people." With the new release of The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal documentary (directed by the late Gord Downie's brother, Mike Downie), a Toronto Life interview with the remaining members of the band on their musical legacy. [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 7:16 AM - 10 comments

Humans imitating AI imitating humans. [more inside]
posted by lucidium at 7:08 AM - 3 comments

You've heard of Iron Maiden (previously). You've probably heard of singer/songwriter Mitch Benn (previously). You may have heard of cult BBC stop-motion animation The Clangers (previously). Now, thanks to Mitch Benn, we have Iron Maiden's The Clangers. [SLYT, 8m30s)
posted by Major Clanger at 3:10 AM - 8 comments

Turtle rookery's future brighter after feral deer eradicated on Great Barrier Reef island. Authorities wipe out feral deer on Wild Duck Island off the central Queensland coast in a bid to preserve one of Australia's largest flatback turtle rookeries.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:26 PM - 1 comment

Robert Schock, 39, was last seen hiking on the North Cascade's Chilliwack River Trail with his dog on July 31. On August 3, his dog was found on the trail by a forest ranger. Three searches of the 17-mile trail were conducted, but he wasn't found. (archive) One month later, a trail crew with the Pacific Northwest Trail Association was working in the field when they heard his barely discernible calls over the sound of the Chilliwack River. (archive) Jeff Kish, the PTNA director gave details on his rescue, saying, "I hope more of this story eventually gets out, but I don't think it's my story to tell." Now, Robert Schock recounts his 30-day disappearance and how he survived. (archive)
posted by ShooBoo at 9:01 PM - 23 comments

That one time when Devo played a Bar Mitzvah. Presenting: Muffy’s Bar Mitzvah.
posted by bq at 7:44 PM - 14 comments

The first crucial thing to understand is that, if you're at least on board with the basic idea that COVID denialism is a pervasive problem, COVID-19 has already disabled you. This is an analysis based on the social model of disability, a major branch of disability theory that emphasizes the way disability is created by a society's failure to provide accommodations for certain bodies and minds rather than intrinsic aspects of those bodies and minds themselves.
posted by evilmomlady at 1:37 PM - 109 comments

The Blowback podcast has released its fifth season on Cambodia, Nixon, Kissinger, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (previously). Each season features hosts Noah Kulwin and Brendan James providing historical analysis of post-WWII U.S. foreign policy, leftist perspectives on the death and destruction its caused, and dark humor for the colorful, macabre cast of characters that populate their narratives. Bonus episodes for season 5 include interviews with journalists Elizabeth Becker and Sy Hersh (previously), and historians Ben Kiernan and Vu Minh Hoang. The first of ten episodes is available here. [more inside]
posted by Hume at 1:27 PM - 10 comments

Helicopter parenting often doesn’t end when a child graduates from high school. Today’s parents have more tools than ever at their disposal to stay involved (or overinvolved) in their children’s lives and keep track of their whereabouts, habits, and activities, from tracking services like Life360 to Facebook groups specifically for parents of college students. If college is historically meant to be a time of self-exploration, complete with bad decisions and murky mistakes, an increasing number of parents seem to be attempting to curtail that growth. from Helicopter U. [Slate]
posted by chavenet at 12:05 PM - 23 comments

"I Enjoy Being A Girl" - Carol Burnett, Chita Rivera, Caterina Valente ala Morticia Addams 5m30s [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 11:49 AM - 7 comments

Do you remember Demi Adejuyigbe making a simple video in 2016 celebrating the date mentioned in Earth, Wind & Fire's classic "September?" He did increasingly elaborate followups in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, and previously [more inside]
posted by kirkaracha at 10:58 AM - 21 comments

"I want to explain exactly what it is that I think makes The Atlantic terrible and why I think we’d all be better off if it stopped publishing." Nathan Robinson in Current Affairs
posted by german_bight at 9:46 AM - 35 comments

Breathtesting cattle to battle climate change. The agriculture industry is a huge greenhouse gas emitter. This breath testing machine gives farmers a real-time record of cattle methane emissions, so they can take measures to reduce them.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:22 AM - 10 comments

As part of the events for this year's fundraising we'll have an Ask the Mods Anything Podcast. Come check out the post with the deets on how to submit your questions!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:13 AM - 5 comments

The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age is an essay by author Thea Lim in the Walrus on what happens to your self worth when everything you do, from work to leisure to hobbies becomes something measured by someone, something you can, perhaps have to, monetize.
If you find yourself asking "why am I doing this?" this is worth your time to read.
posted by tommasz at 7:59 AM - 17 comments

“My priesthood, rooted in the discipline of a spiritual path, tends to be explicit in its ethical demands. But the facts of queer life also unquestionably demand a lived ethical response. What may come as a surprise—what surprises me—is that the ethical demands placed on me by my identity as a queer person & by my involvement in the LGBTQ{+} community tend to be far clearer and more rigorous than those placed on me by my ordination to holy orders.” Reverend Liz Edman’s Queer Virtue [g] [more inside]
posted by HearHere at 7:37 AM - 3 comments

Excavator operators are bringing joy to the world, one two-year-old at a time.
posted by rory at 1:33 AM - 17 comments

We know that denial plays two roles in human life: the positive force that allows a person to rebound from a disabling loss, and the negative force that buries the truth in order—or so we believe—to make life livable. In addition to accommodating the family’s longstanding and hard-won reliance upon denial, the challenge for me was to finally understand my own relationship to denial. I was unable to judge others without first admitting to myself that each of my attempts to write The Child Widow as fiction had failed because I still always included the possibility that maybe the suicide wasn’t entirely deliberate. I knew better—I was right there in the next room—but I still found it possible to deflect. from Rejecting Denial and Embracing Sorrow: On Writing the Story of a Husband’s Suicide by Alexandra Marshall [LitHub] CW: suicide
posted by chavenet at 1:04 AM - 0 comments

It was a known dairy barn axiom that cows are the better temperament for the singing. Milking a female animal,... was an inherently sensual act. More pointedly with the likelihood of being a romance. There never was a right-thinking cow who would milk easily and with earnest devotion if her attendant did not sing to her as he conducted the chore. Worse yet if his hands are cold." [more inside]
posted by rubatan at 12:44 AM - 11 comments

No creator has put more LGBTQ characters on TV than Ryan Murphy. His Aaron Hernandez show raises the question of why so many are killers. [more inside]
posted by Pitachu at 10:30 PM - 7 comments

Vibrant peacock spiders likened to famous artworks delight photographers. Akin to the famous Van Gogh painting, the starry night peacock spider highlights the rare species' beauty. But some people are concerned not enough is being done to protect the arachnids.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:10 PM - 5 comments

Tamsyn Muir -- creator of a queer gothic necromantic space dystopia/paradise from which only she is personally barred -- has nonetheless invited the rest of us back to her world in a new short story. The multi-genre script that is the story occurs midway through Nona the Ninth inside a nested set of souls and also a graduate seminar and also a British country house murder mystery. (Previously and previously).
posted by SandCounty at 4:11 PM - 56 comments

Famed musical writers Howard Ashman and Alan Menken have an abandoned song that I'd never heard of before. Aria For A Cow was made into an animated short several years ago, and it's delightful. 7m
posted by hippybear at 3:34 PM - 3 comments

Ten children drew their favourite sea creatures. Then Australia’s leading artists responded. Ken Done, Jonathan Zawada, Blak Douglas and others created companion pieces to children’s works celebrating sharks and rays. They’re now on display at the Australian Museum.
posted by goo at 3:17 PM - 10 comments

Tishani Doshi (Aeon, 09/16/2024), "Tender, yet creepy": "Tom sits in his box, one blue eye blinkered shut. I reach for him, and I am a girl again, gently rattling his head so his eye can become unstuck." Topics include Freud's "The Uncanny" [PDF], Baudelaire's "The Philosophy of Toys" (a.k.a. "Morale du joujou" and its excerpt "The Plaything of the Poor"), Rilke's "The Unfortunate Fate of Childhood Dolls" (a.k.a. "Puppen" with illustrations by Lotte Pritzel related to her dolls, etc., etc.), Ibsen's A Doll's House, and Mahasweta Devi's Urvashi and Johnny. See also Tishani Doshi's entry at the Poetry Foundation.
posted by Wobbuffet at 11:58 AM - 1 comment

On Thursday afternoon, (Shohei) Ohtani’s legend continued to grow as he wrote the next chapter of one of the best individual offensive seasons in Major League history with arguably the best single-game performance the sport has ever seen. In an otherworldly game in which he stole two bases and went 6-for-6 with a career-high three homers and 10 RBIs, Ohtani proved he’s in a class of his own once again, becoming the first player to hit 50 or more homers and steal 50 or more bases in a single season in Major League history. from Otherworldly Ohtani creates 50-50 club in a 6-for-6 game for the ages [MLB]
posted by chavenet at 11:46 AM - 48 comments

It’s Friday, so it’s a good time to try to Guess the (video/computer) game! Or to go back into the archives and try to guess some of the 859 previous games. (hat tip to Buried Treasure.)
posted by Going To Maine at 11:42 AM - 8 comments

Which is More Difficult - Violin or Piano? (SLYT)
posted by Gyan at 10:56 AM - 32 comments

New York magazine writer Olivia Nuzzi placed on leave after disclosing RFK relationship Nuzzi disclosed that she “had engaged in a personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign.” While the magazine did not identify the subject, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told CNN that the relationship was with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who ran for president as an independent candidate and recently endorsed Donald Trump. The person said the relationship was emotional and digital in nature, not physical. A Kennedy spokesperson told CNN, “Mr. Kennedy only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece.” [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:25 AM - 70 comments

Cards Against Humanity is suing Elon Musk for $15 million dollars
posted by Diskeater at 10:21 AM - 28 comments

"Google has decided that Forbes is the authority in everything. Credit cards, cockroach removal, and getting too high from gummies. Forbes is now the dominant authority in damn near everything. [...] I know a lot of folks in the SEO industry. Not one person thinks this is normal or okay. I even heard from a source that I deeply trust that Google employees were complaining about Forbes internally. That was two years ago." A deep dive on the underpinnings of Forbes Marketplace, the parasite SEO operation launched in 2019 by Lars Lofgren.
posted by Rhomboid at 6:38 AM - 54 comments

Farmer invents machinery that smashes bejesus out of weed seeds. Weeds cost Australia's crop farming industry around $3.3 billion dollars [US $2.25 billion dollars] each year, but a home-grown invention that crushes herbicide-resistant weed seeds could make that a problem of the past.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:37 AM - 19 comments

In 2021, House House, the makers of Untitled Goose Game, created a proof-of-concept for an animation series involving the Goose and its hapless victims. It never made it to production, but they've released the proof-of-concept animation to Youtube. So for just four minutes of your time, please journey back to the beleaguered village, and watch the Untitled Goose Programme. (Previously and first on Untitled Goose Game)
posted by JHarris at 5:19 AM - 20 comments

"conventional wisdom has been that black hole jets can’t be larger than about a quarter the radius of a cosmic void, and none larger has ever been seen. That all changed with the discovery of Porphyrion..." [bigthink] [more inside]
posted by HearHere at 2:40 AM - 14 comments

It is now difficult to imagine the mass of general readers—assuming they exist—being reached even by a historian of genius. The exigencies of modern academic publishing, declining levels of general culture among historians themselves, and, in some cases, what occasionally looks less like sloppiness or indifference and more like a positive hostility toward good writing among peer reviewers, above all the atrophying of readers’ own attention spans—for all these reasons, it seems to me unlikely that we will ever see a classic on the order of Runciman capture the public imagination. from The Rise of Post-Literate History by Matthew Walther [Compact]
posted by chavenet at 12:45 AM - 26 comments

Hopes for future hatchlings outside Perth as rare western swamp tortoise returns to southern home. An endangered tortoise that excited wildlife carers by surviving outside its only known habitats in Perth has returned home to its birthplace and site of a relocation trial in Western Australia's South West. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:54 PM - 7 comments

At least according to Carter Vail, a musician on YouTube (and probably Tik Tok, but I am old). Let him tell you about the thing all guys do, how to succeed at wizarding school, or how to appreciate marine life. Or you could listen to his really good serious music if you are into that sort of thing, I guess.
posted by pattern juggler at 4:35 PM - 9 comments

There are some interesting people moving their bodies interestingly in the music video half•alive - Sophie's House (Official Video). [5m]
posted by hippybear at 3:20 PM - 7 comments

Explore the beautiful, intricate paths of ships over a year - tracked from America's busiest ports to the open ocean via AIS marine tracking data.
posted by mhoye at 1:04 PM - 11 comments

Draw Lines ... Make Music ... Share your Instrument
posted by chavenet at 11:55 AM - 12 comments

Euripides Unbound is an account of the recent discovery by archeologist Heba Adly of a papyrus containing 97 lines from Polyidus and Ino, lost plays by Euripides, written by Robert Cioffi who participated in the dig led by Basem Gehad. The fragment was deciphered by classicists Yvona Trnka-Amrhein and John Gibert, who have been interviewed about it by Johanna Hanink on the Lesche Podcast. Bill Allan wrote a short essay about the fragment for the Times Literary Supplement, which led Mary Beard to discuss it on the TLS Podcast.
posted by Kattullus at 11:02 AM - 8 comments

"It is not often that one in the process of learning of, or reading, a book develops three different opinions about the book. I have heard of Lea Ypi’s Free after it became an international bestseller. I was even then somewhat intrigued by the topic, an autobiographical story of growing up in Albania at “the end of history”, given that Albania was somewhat of a black box (because of the isolationist policies followed by its long-time president Enver Hoxha). Yet since I had a uniform negative view about any personal reminiscences coming out of Eastern Europe, I was almost sure not to read the book? Why such mistrust?" Branko Milanovic with a thoughtful review of Lea Ypi's awardwinning Free: Coming of Age at the End of History.
posted by mittens at 10:51 AM - 3 comments