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Drue Langlois' (previously) plucky post-apocalyptic scavenger Plague Roach has finally left the post-apocalyptic wasteland. But how? Through death? Even deeper escapism? Or something else entirely? Find out in the seemingly final installment of Staying Positive in the Apocalypse, Veil of Cloud - or watch the entire saga here.
posted by BiggerJ at 4:33 PM - 0 comments

Venice Carnival 2024, masks at the Venice Arsenal and St. Mark's 4K [1h10m]
posted by hippybear at 1:58 PM - 7 comments

Private equity firms are utilizing public trust in long-standing publications to sell every product under the sun. In a bid to replace falling ad revenue, publishing houses are selling their publications for parts to media groups that are quick to establish affiliate marketing deals. They’re buying magazines we love, closing their print operations, turning them into digital-only, laying off the actual journalists who made us trust in their content in the first place, and hiring third-party companies to run the affiliate arm of their sites. While this happens, investment firms and ‘innovative digital media companies’ are selling you bad products. These Digital Goliaths shouldn’t be able to use product recommendations as their personal piggy bank, simply flying through Google updates off the back of ‘the right signals,’ an old domain, or the echo of a reputable brand that is no longer.

Indie air purifier review site HouseFresh does a deep dive into the incestuous world of top-ranking Google product search results. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 1:22 PM - 32 comments

"An alluring name, Forbidden Courses. I decided to take a look. Although my spleen is not inflamed by the culture wars, although my heart is not lifted by calls like Bari Weiss’s for a “coalition” comprised of “trads, whigs, normies,” I was curious. How plausible was their project? What ideas would they discuss? I applied to UATX last March. There was the cover letter, and the three essay questions, and the writing sample. I speckled them with Harold Bloom and Nietzsche. “Exploitation … belongs to the essence of what lives,” that sort of thing. April 6th, the letter arrived in my email inbox: “Congratulations! … UATX is extending you an offer of admission to Session I of this year's Forbidden Courses.” I flew south in June. " [Web Archive link] [more inside]
posted by reclusive_thousandaire at 10:07 AM - 63 comments

To Become A Lion is a short, colorful video on the art and origin of Lion Dancing. (The pole jumps are nuts and for some it might be the first time you've seen a funeral lion). [more inside]
posted by storybored at 8:12 AM - 6 comments

Who was the woman who inspired ska's ubiquitous Beat Girl logo? Joanna Wallace found a picture of the woman who inspired Hunt Emerson's iconic logo, and it led her to start digging into the history and career of Brigitte Bond. [more inside]
posted by ursus_comiter at 6:59 AM - 10 comments

"Informant’s dad told it to her. She found it so funny. She likes that it’s punny and unexpected. Her dad would tell it to her over and over again. His dad told it too." An entry from the USC Digital Folklore Archives. The International Society for Folk Narrative Research points to it as one of many digital folklore archives [PDF]. If you don't have time to visit digital archives, a dad joke generator may be more your speed.
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:12 AM - 16 comments

"For me, a luddite is someone who looks at technology critically and rejects aspects of it that are meant to disempower, deskill or impoverish them. Technology is not something that’s introduced by some god in heaven who has our best interests at heart. Technological development is shaped by money, it’s shaped by power, and it’s generally targeted towards the interests of those in power as opposed to the interests of those without it. That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they’re dumb? That was concocted by bosses.” from 'Humanity’s remaining timeline? It looks more like five years than 50’: meet the neo-luddites warning of an AI apocalypse [Grauniad; ungated] [CW: Yudkowski] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:29 AM - 49 comments

Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters. Author Lynée Denise on the book's genesis: I saw this video of one of her performances from 1970 and I was like who the hell is this? Who is this woman commanding the room, commanding the band with all this dignity, all this ruthless inner peace?

Thornton is sometimes overlooked in music history, but her rendition of "Hound Dog" came first, and was a smash hit to boot. More happily “Ball and Chain” became one of Janis Joplin’s signature songs with Big Mama’s blessing, after Joplin encountered Thornton singing it in a Divisadero St club in San Francisco. Dubbed "Big Mama" for her size, Thornton had raised herself out of poverty, turning professional singer at the age of fourteen in 1940. [Previously on MeFi] [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 6:39 PM - 6 comments

What Drives Us [1h30m] is a documentary about being an on-the-road rock and roll band. It's an interesting journey of self-discovery. Directed by Dave Grohl. Includes interviews with unexpected people.
posted by hippybear at 6:21 PM - 10 comments

Captain Ahab’s ivory leg, carved from the jawbone of a whale, stands as one of the most iconic pieces of imagery in all of literature. Draw a man with a peg leg next to whale and he’s instantly recognizable as Ahab, as is the general idea of what happened to the leg and the less than amicable relationship he has with that whale. It’s all in the leg; and the leg tells the whole story. Which is why it’s so maddening, so confounding, that although Melville provides the minutest details about every last person, animal, and object in Moby-Dick, he fails to tell us which leg Ahab is missing. from Ahab's Leg Dilemma: Part 1, Part 2
posted by chavenet at 2:24 PM - 39 comments

On its maiden voyage in 1628, the Vasa warship capsized and sank. Originally thought to be caused by too many cannons on too many decks, one of the leading theories now is that shipbuilders used different rulers. Four were found in the wreckage, two calibrated with the Swedish Foot and the other two rulers used the Amsterdam Foot. Not only are they different lengths (29.69 cm versus 28.31 cm), the Dutch Foot was divided into 11 instead of 12 inches. These errors multiplied over the size of the ship led to lopsided construction and potentially the inevitable sinking. [more inside]
posted by autopilot at 12:14 PM - 49 comments

Twenty-five years ago today, the movie Office Space premiered. Watch the original trailer. Read Roger Ebert’s 3-star review (“a comic cry of rage against the nightmare of modern office life.”) Enjoy an oral history. Read reflections on the impact of the movie from Variety, BBC, and The Guardian. Maybe you want to buy yourself a red Swingline stapler to celebrate?
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 8:24 AM - 68 comments

SPRINTS - Up and Comer It's your weekly free thread! Drop in, look around, let us know what's up with you.
posted by Gorgik at 8:14 AM - 66 comments

I discovered a gem on YouTube today, and it hides much deeper treasure. Bruce & friend Kevin: Live at the Rivoli! PART 1 [45m] is two Kids who come from The Hall doing a stage show. I don't know if Part 2 will be posted, but I hope so. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 7:16 AM - 7 comments

"Gorey’s approach to the representation of time is obviously variegated. His works are commonly set within a hybrid Victorian/Edwardian period and often elicit further confusion by containing comically anachronistic details. As indicated, in the examples such as The Broken Spoke, The Object-Lesson, and The Water Flowers, Gorey employs manipulations with temporal boundaries within the framework of nonsense, such as simultaneity, digression, and repetition, which lead to a suggestion of timelessness and infinity." [SLPDF] [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:31 AM - 12 comments

The chief and lethal irony of Fixer is that the more William persecutes the rich, the richer he himself becomes. By the end of it all, he is stranded in meaninglessness, unsure what his mission has accomplished, or for what reasons he’d been chosen to live it. “[M]y revenge,” he says, “had nothing to do with me, but instead was something I’d walked in on at just the right moment.” from Lethal Irony: On Han Ong’s “Fixer Chao” by Zoë Hu [LARB; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 1:54 AM - 3 comments

Brushtail possums have not lived in this part of Australia for almost 100 years, but now they are back. Locally extinct from Western Australia's northern Wheatbelt for almost a century, a brushtail possum has been photographed out and about, signalling a landscape-scale conservation success. (If you're thinking "I've heard bad things about brushtailed possums", that's because feral [introduced] brushtailed possums are an genuine ecological catastrophe in New Zealand. Here in Australia where the brushtailed possums actually belong in the ecosystem, this is good news.)
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:45 PM - 8 comments

Redditor "whypic" has been posting daily installments to the Glorious Tom Bombadil subreddit of an original webcomic work of fan-fiction describing an adventure of the mysterious side-character Tom Bombadil from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. In the webcomic, Bombadil is portrayed like Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes, and his naive enthusiasm is contrasted with the more worldly and serious elf-king Gil-Galad who is more of a "Hobbes" figure. Who is Tom Bombadil? Let "Jess of the Shire" explain. Webcomic installments 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 (Previously: Dark Bombadil) (Previously)
posted by Schmucko at 5:59 PM - 21 comments

Gilbert & Sullivan's Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, a highly condensed operetta by Mitch Benn [SLYT, 9:33]
posted by Faint of Butt at 5:20 PM - 8 comments

"There are at least a dozen Dracula ballets, beginning with the 1899 version created for the Budapest Opera." "The dancing has teeth (and so do the dancers)." The count at the Polish National Ballet (video [YT]. Dracula in Kansas City. Three Draculas to watch [YT].
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:01 PM - 6 comments

THE RITZ-CARLTON MALDIVES | Phenomenal private island resort (full tour) [1h12m] is a wordless tour of the resort. You won't get any perky central casting aspiring host here; it's images and music and an extremely engineered hotel resort that is basically at one with the water. I can't afford it and am not really into oceans, but if I were and could, this could be amazing.
posted by hippybear at 2:59 PM - 42 comments

Inside Johnny Depp's Epic Bromance with Mohammad bin Salman (Vanity Fair, archive.is)
posted by box at 2:47 PM - 43 comments

Paul Campos, University of Colorado law professor known for his work in exposing the law school scam, has obtained a settlement in his Title VII retaliation case. Campos has now blogged the whole sordid course of events: How I Won My Lawsuit Against the University of Colorado - Part II - Part III [more inside]
posted by Not A Thing at 2:43 PM - 34 comments

Introducing the most iconic short films of 2023. Sourced by our curation team from this year's Staff Picks selections, the Best of the Year awards brings you the crème of the crème de la crème. from Vimeo
posted by chavenet at 2:32 PM - 1 comment

Good writers are perverts. (desktop only)
posted by simmering octagon at 1:55 PM - 18 comments

In 2017, google said goodbye to the (controversial) blobs emoji collection to the dismay of many. More than seven years later, the blobs live on. Community efforts to extend the collection persist, including the beloved cat variant. Most notably, blobs.gg, a >30k member community designing blobs for Discord.
posted by lianove3 at 12:05 PM - 6 comments

The invisible substance called dark matter remains one of the biggest mysteries in cosmology. Perhaps, a new study suggests, this strange substance arises from a 'dark mirror universe' that's been linked to ours since the dawn of time.
posted by brundlefly at 10:03 AM - 29 comments

From NYT (ungated and nytimes.com): Fairshake revealed two weeks ago in federal filings that it and two affiliated super PACs had amassed a combined roughly $80 million in 2023, with most of the money coming from three major cryptocurrency players: Coinbase, Ripple Labs, and Andreessen Horowitz. It is not exactly clear what about Ms. Porter has drawn the crypto industry’s ire other than her record as a progressive who favored regulating the industry to better favor consumers and made the grilling of a financial chief executive a viral moment a few years ago.
posted by AlSweigart at 9:09 AM - 56 comments

Cat Yronwode is famous in the comic book world, but you might not know that she is also a practitioner and teacher of hoodoo, magic spells and herbs. In the bottom of her extensive website you will find the Arcane Archive, a plethora of Usenet posts from the 1990s (?) on Religion, Magick, Divination and other assorted stuff. [more inside]
posted by wittgenstein at 8:40 AM - 6 comments

Eoin Reardon is a 20-something woodworker from Crossbarry Co Cork, who makes [eg a new axe-handle] with trad hand tools for a million+ @pintofplane TikTok followers . He laments the stigma of trades in schools. [more inside]
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:34 AM - 10 comments

What is a rose, visually? A rose comprises its intrinsics, including the distribution of geometry, texture, and material specific to its object category. With knowledge of these intrinsic properties, we may render roses of different sizes and shapes, in different poses, and under different lighting conditions. In this work, we build a generative model that learns to capture such object intrinsics from a single image, such as a photo of a bouquet. Such an image includes multiple instances of an object type. These instances all share the same intrinsics, but appear different due to a combination of variance within these intrinsics and differences in extrinsic factors, such as pose and illumination. Experiments show that our model successfully learns object intrinsics (distribution of geometry, texture, and material) for a wide range of objects, each from a single Internet image. Our method achieves superior results on multiple downstream tasks, including intrinsic image decomposition, shape and image generation, view synthesis, and relighting. from Seeing a Rose in Five Thousand Ways
posted by chavenet at 2:10 AM - 1 comment

Hazard reduction burns increase risk of severe bushfires (forest fires), report finds. Traditional fire management strategies such as hazard reduction burns, logging, and the thinning of undergrowth have increased the flammability of forests, new research has found.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:35 PM - 8 comments

I lost my keys again! Do I have dementia?
Normal Aging: Having the feeling that a word is on the tip of your tongue but remembering it later.
Signs of Dementia: Mispronouncing words frequently or not understanding words that people are saying.
See also:
Are Alzheimer’s disease and dementia the same thing?
When is it time to stop driving?
posted by spamandkimchi at 7:28 PM - 22 comments

I hadn't heard of Nigerian charismatic pastor TB Joshua [Wikipedia] until I heard his name floating about during overnight BBC World Service radio programming recently. I looked around and found this: Disciples: The Cult Of TB Joshua, three episodes from BBC Africa Eye [~50m each, YT Playlist, CW: descriptions and depictions of religious manipulation, sexual and physical abuse, other cult leader behavior].
posted by hippybear at 7:10 PM - 3 comments

'Kid Auto Races at Venice' is a 1914 silent film with Charlie Chaplin appearing for the first time as 'The Little Tramp.' Here is a colorized version. (slyt. 6:51) Previous megathread
posted by clavdivs at 4:06 PM - 9 comments

Star Trek: Borg - Remastered is a 1996 FMV Star Trek game featuring John de Lancie remastered into HD & made playable in browser. yt trailer. A review of the original game.
posted by juv3nal at 3:13 PM - 30 comments

As his apartment on the Lower East Side crumbled, a former Club Kid resented the moneyed millennials who filled his building. Then he let them in on a secret that transformed their lives. (NYTimes gift link)
posted by praemunire at 1:39 PM - 25 comments

Twenty-seven years later, Kirsten Bakis is publishing her second novel: King Nyx. [more inside]
posted by Winnie the Proust at 11:09 AM - 11 comments

Australia's oldest-known platypus living in the wild discovered in a Melbourne creek. The discovery of a 24-year-old wild platypus gives researchers and conservationists a greater insight into the longevity of one of Australia's most unique animals.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:27 AM - 3 comments

The Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective comic strip only lasted a couple of years, from December 1978 to September 1980, though people saved individual strips, and two collections were later released. Can You Solve The Mystery? came along a few years later, which was an adaptation of the Hawkeye Collins and Amy Adams books. Cliff Hanger showed up around the same time, featuring mysteries in 1930s jungles and that sort of thing, coincident with the popularity of another 1930s-era kinda thing, though it's not "CLIFF-HANGER". [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:11 AM - 6 comments

I FEEL AT TIMES that I still live in the never-ending 20th century, that I’m stuck here, that maybe everyone is stuck here, even people born too late to have seen it happen. True, there are smartphones now, and new types of ugly buildings. Images are sharper, even when you zoom in. You can tell that time has passed because unremarkable things like Sweetheart Jazz cups have acquired the status of fetish objects. But some part of the American mindset is still in 1999, which feels substantially closer to us now than 1979 did then. from Heritage 2000, a review of Time Bomb Y2K in N+1
posted by chavenet at 1:54 AM - 30 comments

A stingray that hasn't shared a tank with another stingray for at least eight years is pregnant. First link. Second link. It is likely caused by parthenogenesis, which is a type of asexual reproduction. The mostly rare phenomenon can occur in some insects, fish, amphibians, birds and reptiles, but not mammals. Other kinds of sharks, skates and rays — a trio of animals often grouped together — have had these kinds of pregnancies in human care. To be clear, Dr Lyons said, these animals were not cloning themselves. Instead, a female's egg fuses with another cell, triggers cell division and leads to the creation of an embryo. The cell that fuses with the egg is known as a polar body. They are produced when a female is creating an egg but these usually aren't used.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:36 PM - 34 comments

Alexei Navalny is dead at 47, say Russian prison authorities. The crusading pro-democracy activist was a constant thorn in the side of Vladimir Putin, financing documentaries exposing Kremlin corruption and rallying support as a popular opposition leader; a documentary on his own life won an Oscar and global acclaim last year. Long persecuted by the state, he was poisoned by the notorious nerve agent Novichok in 2020 and returned the following year to face imprisonment under an increasingly authoritarian regime. While the collective West condemns the unsubtle murder of a political prisoner, liberal Russians are left without any clear successor -- though Navalny himself even in death endeavored to tell supporters "You're not allowed to give up."
posted by Rhaomi at 5:11 PM - 87 comments

This is completely fascinating. It's the story of the biggest Swedish export to the world, told through an unexpected lens. Stig Anderson [Wikipedia] was the founder of Polar Music, was one of Sweden's most prolific songwriters, and later was entirely intertwined with ABBA. STIKKAN [2024, 1h, Swedish/multi-language with English subtitles] tells the story of his surprising life and career, and it's worth a look! [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 3:39 PM - 0 comments

The rat with the big balls and the enormous penis – how Frontiers published a paper with botched AI-generated images "These figures are clearly not scientifically correct, but if such botched illustrations can pass peer review so easily, more realistic-looking AI-generated figures have likely already infiltrated the scientific literature." Contains a mildly NSFW image. [more inside]
posted by What is E. T. short for? at 1:24 PM - 59 comments

Trump hit with 3-year ban from doing business in New York State and ordered to pay $364 million dollars.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 12:38 PM - 173 comments

Politics this, plagiarism that. Harvard is in the limelight, which means that the student journalists of the Harvard Crimson have picked up some competition.
posted by Artw at 12:00 PM - 22 comments

In her remarkable life, Elizabeth Gloucester embodied a new model of Black, feminist capitalism. [more inside]
posted by praemunire at 7:54 AM - 4 comments

Many an ancient road is a sunken road. They are formed by the passage of people, animals, and vehicles over time. Things of beauty, they are found hither and yon, including in Middle Earth. They should be considered as critical sites of the Anthropocene, signature human impacts on the land that are important, perhaps vital, and still not wholly understood. Also known as holloways, they have inspired literary and artistic reflection, conjuring images of fantastic landscapes. Note that, per Wikipedia, a holloway is not the same thing as a tree tunnel, an excavated road, or a gully.
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:46 AM - 11 comments