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Expect this element to turn up in an Alan Moore novel any day now.

The whole story feels one feckless don away from tipping over into an M.R. James story.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 2:15 PM on December 22, 2023

"Fast forward almost sixty years" - this took me back to "making" models when I was a kid (my father helping), then making them for real. Fine GenX memory.

My brother went further, getting into model ships and raising their sails inside bottles, or crafting them from wood.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 2:10 PM on December 22, 2023

Sauce Trough, I'm sorry - looks like copy and paste error.
Can mods help, please?
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 12:27 PM on December 21, 2023

Thank you!
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 8:11 AM on December 22, 2023

“One does what one can.”
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 10:59 AM on December 20, 2023

Thank you for sharing all of that, dancestoblue. Please take care.

(I'm not too far behind you, hitting 57 soon)
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 5:25 PM on December 20, 2023

"14. The greatest year ever for clean energy" - this is something Bill McKibben's been telling the world about. So important.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 5:16 PM on December 20, 2023

‘aubergine deformity’.

That's an emoji no one needs.

It would be, of course, a fine name for a band.

Or for a colorful assassin.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 10:55 AM on December 20, 2023

Great photo from a friend about 10 km away.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 10:50 AM on December 20, 2023

People of Earth: 2023 is nearly done. There are holidays. Maybe the year can just relax and leave us alone for a blessed minute -

Iceland: Watch this.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 10:52 AM on December 20, 2023

I wonder why Unsolved Mysteries turned them down. Did they conclude it was just too likely Alan had died?
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 12:05 PM on December 17, 2023

For about a decade in the 1970s, the old Hollywood moguls had died off or retired and the boomers moved in with their new ideals. Mainstream movies would regularly buck the status quo.

posted by zardoz

Fairly eponhysterical!
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 2:46 PM on December 16, 2023

Such a great scene from a great film.
So many fine details, like Beale nervously making prophet noises at passers-by on the way up, or Jensen's sudden tonal shifts.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 2:53 PM on December 16, 2023

I love this line from the Wikipedia article:
"McCurdy decided to incorporate his training with nitroglycerin into his robberies. This often caused problems as he was overzealous..."
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 2:52 PM on December 16, 2023

Agreed on The Sheep Look Up, ob1quixote. I just reread it and the despairing ending hit me as hard as it did the first time.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 1:42 PM on December 9, 2023

Re: that Gramsci quote, it's been in my mind for some time now.

It led me to a couple of similar ones.

It is a time of confrontation, this transition, the time of transition of the old society to a new one that does not exist yet, but it’s being created with the confrontation of the ghosts.
-Paulo Freire in the 1960s

Something… was growing old and weak, dying out; and something… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 1:45 PM on December 9, 2023

Futurama's "the Stupid Ages".

That's also a movie from 2009.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 2:16 PM on December 10, 2023

I'd really like to turn my CPAP into a Giger Alien setup, like this.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 1:28 PM on December 9, 2023

Ah, that one's out of stock. I'll keep looking.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 9:00 PM on December 9, 2023

A very good reading. Thank you for this one, clavdivs.
And thanks for that one, too, Dobbs: faster, more aggressive.

(looks fondly at his Black Sparrow stack)
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 12:03 PM on December 8, 2023

Good luck, workers.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 8:38 PM on December 5, 2023

I'm an academic. I'm very familiar with plagiarism, having been a classroom professor for years. And my field of study is academia (specifically, academic's future). So I am already primed for this.

But I don't know hbomberguy. I don't know James Somerton. And like many academics I am *enormously* beyond busy right now, in December, when a semester is careening to an end and the new semester is coming up fast.

Thanks to some comments, I'll give… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 4:26 PM on December 3, 2023

Running notes:

It starts with sf writers Ben Bova and Harlan Ellison (previously) and the Brillo story. Good example.

Ah, so this is about YouTube plagiarism, not the academic kind. So if it's all about video, it makes sense to make a video about it.

...at this rate it'll take me a week or two.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 3:37 PM on December 4, 2023

toward the end of the video

OK. I'll keep plugging along.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 10:23 AM on December 5, 2023

This looks excellent and inspiring, jasper411. Thank you for the post.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 6:22 PM on December 3, 2023

Bill McKibben:

the UAE’s close ally, Saudi Arabia, hard at work on an Oil Development Sustainability Programme which involved hooking African and Asian nations on fossil fuels. It is almost cartoonishly villainous...
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 7:02 PM on December 1, 2023

I almost got to meet Björk a few years ago. I was in Iceland for a conference about biophilic design, which she was a big supporter of. One afternoon we split into two sessions in two rooms. One room was led by a Scandinavian government minister, the other by Björk. I had to go to the first one because of my work and have been sad about it ever since.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 5:04 PM on December 1, 2023

Thank you for the big post, kliuless.

I wanted to point out the one about Arizona State University becoming a chip center.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 1:27 PM on November 29, 2023

Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to become an episode. When I do still catch the odd glimpse, it’s peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome, confining themselves to the corner of the eye.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 1:16 PM on November 29, 2023

Across 1913 Paris, 2014 Los Angeles, and 2044 Paris, Gabrielle is haunted by recurring imagery — pigeons, fortune tellers, dolls, Madame Butterfly — as well as a deep sense of impending doom, the vague idea that something awful is going to happen to her

I'm reminded of Bodies, which Netflix recently released. Along with David Mitchell's novels. Is this kind of multi-timeline framing on the rise?
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 5:25 PM on November 27, 2023

Netflix has a huge amount of foreign films available if that tickles your fancy...

Agreed. I also nominate Criterion.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 5:26 PM on November 27, 2023

This makes sense. Goats eat every damn thing.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 5:17 PM on November 27, 2023

I think seanmpuckett summed it up well. This is about the revolution of internet porn:

Sex scenes in the 80s and 90s were intended to titillate, and could do so and make money because porn was not mainstream. So you could sell a movie like Body Heat or 9 1/2 Weeks or Fatal Attraction with two (or three) hot actors fumbling around an awkward plot for two hours. You went to the theatre because you wanted to see how nasty they'd actually get on screen. That was… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 6:39 AM on November 27, 2023

What should we do about the French?

The best course to be taken in this case is to send over one of our Generals with such forces as shall be thought sufficient for the purpose; and when he arrives at his post, to give him all possible assistance by sea and land, that the French may be put to a speedy and effectual defeat, and so be left without any pretence of power or authority to intermeddle any more in the affairs of this kingdom.

What should… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 7:17 PM on November 26, 2023

I'm in the anti-Social Network camp, partly because I'm not a Sorkin fan.

I do think it plays as a horror movie, as per "The unsettling ambience of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s Oscar-winning score sets the surprisingly portentous tone."
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 4:18 PM on November 26, 2023

Great music and voices.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 3:27 PM on November 26, 2023

I eventually entered rehab at the very hospital where Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, a hero of mine since childhood, had died in the seventies.

Serling was intensely interested in loneliness. Check out "Where Is Everybody?", the Twilight Zone pilot, for one example.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 12:53 PM on November 24, 2023

AMONG THE THINGS you will learn from watching Buster Keaton’s Our Hospitality:
...
* The Newtownian physics of waterfalls.

Indeed. What a scene!
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 12:49 PM on November 24, 2023

Obligatory: "I'm the god!"
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 2:44 PM on November 22, 2023

There's a great passage in the relevant Caro biography about Lyndon Johnson locked in a room while the assassination is sorted out. Caro imagines what Johnson was thinking. Then someone unlocks the door and LBJ emerges, full of plans and raring to go.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 9:39 AM on November 22, 2023

GenX here. I've worked my whole life in low-paying jobs: used bookstore worker, humanities prof in the South, nonprofit, now independent scholar. That's mean lower incomes and poor retirement funding, even with advanced degrees.

I've long assumed I would work until I died.

But I have also *hoped* for that. See, that way I can keep providing for my family and then exit swiftly with little cost. My dread is being disabled so that I can't work… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 4:51 PM on November 20, 2023

I love seeing these rediscoveries. I just wish it didn't take catastrophe to bring them back.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 2:25 PM on November 18, 2023

Good for her to do this - to have done this, rather.

Yet we need systematic reform. Universal health care, please.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 2:20 PM on November 18, 2023

25 years!
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 8:44 AM on November 18, 2023

One photo caption in the article:
Neil might have thought the deck needed to be resealed.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 8:10 AM on November 15, 2023

Maybe we could get the wealthy to fetishize paying taxes.

I like where this is going in an almost Borgesian direction.

Imagine programmers creating bots which use findom for what they see as social good:
-redistribute wealth (but to whom, and how?)
-fund revolutionary organizations
-funnel money to the global south as climate reparations
-set up a secret Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism project
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 8:00 AM on November 14, 2023

That sounds really sweet.

Now I'm remembering the late Robert Anton Wilson's love of the Wake.

And me, reading some of it out loud to people on acid.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 6:56 PM on November 13, 2023

I started using Mastodon when it came out and bounced off of it several times over the years. I kept running into problems: one server's admin/allies kept scolding or warning me without much explanation; hard to find folks or topics; not getting responses to my responses, or to my posts.

Last year I pinged a bunch of Mastodon users in my field, and a few actually helped out. Found a better server and have had a few quiet conversations.

That's… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 11:59 AM on November 13, 2023

"It isn't enough just to have ideas and drive to space. We have to take the time to understand the implications of our ideas."

Hence Frankenstein...
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 4:59 AM on November 13, 2023

A family member has a house in Detroit. The house next door was abandoned years and years ago. A tree grew up through one of its walls.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 4:56 AM on November 13, 2023