Activity from Fiasco da Gama
Displaying post 50 to 100 of 167
Caffenol
Develop your film: with coffee, red wine, Croatian rosé, drain cleaner and acetaminophen, beetroot, ajvar (capsicum chutney), or gas station beer.
Unidentified symbol in graffiti
Please help me identify this symbol or logo, if it has any association with anything. This was inside a derelict house that had been used as a squat.
How to remove film from a broken point and shoot camera
I'd like to remove a roll of 35mm film from a broken point and shoot camera. I have a dark bag and some simple tools.
Block
AN0M
'When an Australian underworld figure began distributing customised phones containing the app to his associates as a secure means to communicate, police could monitor their messages'. 'From 2018, the FBI was covertly in control of An0m and Australian police introduced the technical ability to decrypt communications on the platform and monitor them for years'. 'Police claim the plan to use an encrypted app was hatched overseas over a few beers with FBI agents in 2018, before police figured out how to decrypt all messages'.
A Duty Of Care
Eight children and an octogenarian nun took the Australian Minister for the Environment to court, to establish whether there is a 'duty of care' to future generations, relating to climate change. The Australian Federal Court today ruled that the duty of care exists.
English strip comic about an angry tabloid reader
There was a black-and-white comic strip, drawn in the UK in the 2000s, where the main character was an extremely right-wing middle-aged English man with a toothbrush moustache, and the premise was that he got angry at things on his computer. He made an onomatopeic noise like 'GNAARRR', and had a put-upon wife who was never actually drawn. It could be in fairly poor taste. What was this comic?
Multiple Destroyers Were Swarmed By Mysterious 'Drones'
Swatchbook
Bad Birds in Quarantine
'The chestnut-bellied seed finch, known in Guyana as the towa-towa, is at the center of a lucrative underground trade that culminates in Queens, New York, where immigrant Guyanese men engage the birds in elaborate, secretive competitions.' [CW: animal abuse]
Electronic Plastic
Experiences/descriptions of 20thC illegal gambling
I am interested in hearing about or reading about cultures of illegal gambling businesses in physical places, in the twentieth century, but before the era of the internet.
The death of the gay bar
Danny Ray
In what became an iconic part of Brown’s concerts, Ray would walk onstage mid-“Please, Please, Please” and drape Brown with a cape, only for the singer to explode out of the cape with a second wind.Danny Ray, 'cape man' and emmcee for James Brown, has died at 85.
Atlas des Régions Naturelles
High Frequency Trading on Shortwave Radio
KA7OEI discovered a massive 'intruder' signal, interfering with other transmissions, at the top of the 20m band. It's high frequency trading over shortwave radio, a growing field.
Brereton Report into war crimes by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan
The Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force (IGADF) has released the Brereton Report, which includes evidence that Australian soldiers committed war crimes in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016.
Instant Lettering
Remote driving range margin
How do people who drive long distances in remote areas calculate their margin of safety for carrying fuel?
Bilbies in Sturt National Park
Bilbies have been released into NSW’s Sturt National Park, 100 years after being declared extinct. Video.
Dean Jones 1961–2020
Toots Hibbert
Zipper-mouth face
Hutt River Province, 1970–2020
After 50 years of secession, the Principality of Hutt River will rejoin Australia.
Galaksija
'I think I'm the only one here who's only been born once'
I recall, during the George W. Bush era, an anecdote in which an official looked around a meeting room and broke the ice by saying 'I think I'm the only one here who's only been born once'.
Who said it? Was it a real person, or if not, whose joke am I thinking of?
Diverted Traffic
'A new newsletter and online collection from the [London Review of Books], featuring just one piece from our archive per day, chosen for its compulsive, immersive and escapist qualities, and also for its total lack of references to plague, pandemics or quarantine.'
A blog of grille, vent, and ventilation elements...
All Up In My Grille A blog of grille, vent, and ventilation elements in buildings, and other minor architectural details.
Old Soap
'In many ways, the soap I seek could be described as mundane. I seek the brands which were once very commonplace, but which are now really very difficult to find.'Matthew Brooks's instagram account is a collection of old bars of packaged soap.
When Carbon Copies Fade
A blog post suggests that the photos in Fading Flamingos, a project by Maximilian Mann nominated for the 2020 World Press Photo competition, are substantially similar to those of another photographer, Solmaz Daryani. Mann has responded to the allegations, to photography website PetaPixel.
Weeds of Melbourne
'Within Melbourne’s gardens, reserves, infrastructure and wasted lands sprout all of the traumas and dislocations of the past, and so these will do from now to the end of recorded time, no matter the investment of labour and personal or collective suffering devoted to revegetation. The weeds, a thousand strong, are the newest layer atop the bay sludge and basalt spills that form the Melbourne geology, a seedbank that has made itself a permanent stratigraphic marker of the arrival. Just add light and water.'
Boda Boda Madness
'boda boda madness by dutch photographer jan hoek and ugandan-kenyan fashion designer bobbin case is a project capturing nairobi’s motortaxi drivers, known as boda boda, who, in their effort to strengthen their appeal to customers, add striking features to their motorclycles, turning them into artworks on wheels.'
The Edison of the Slot Machines
‘But in the slot cheat business, triumph is always short-lived. Less than two years after The Monkey Paw’s invention, fresh innovations in security rendered it obsolete. Indeed, the legacy of The Monkey Paw wasn’t so much in its lasting efficacy, but in the confidence it instilled in Tommy. Archimedes once said, “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth.” At the end of the nineties, Tommy Carmichael declared, “Give me a slot machine and I’ll beat it.”’
Red Panda Finder
Red Panda Finder is a database and genealogical reference for red pandas in zoos throughout the world.
The Cash Railway Website
Weaponised Boomer Memes
Native water rats have worked out how to safely eat cane toads
Eat your heart out: native water rats have worked out how to safely eat cane toads
Australia’s water rats, or Rakali, are one of Australia’s beautiful but lesser-known native rodents. And these intelligent, semi-aquatic rats have revealed another talent: they are one of the only Australian mammals to safely eat toxic cane toads... The rats, which can grow to over 1kg, are the only mammal found to specifically target large toads, neatly dissecting the toads to eat their hearts and livers while avoiding the poisonous skin and glands.
Just take a walk down lonely street / to Haegumgang Hotel
North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un has visited the Mt Kumgang resort, ordering the project promoted by South Korean President Moon Jae-in and US President Trump to be razed, denouncing the buildings as 'just a hotchpotch with no national character at all'. Mt Kumgang's Haegumgang Hotel was the brainchild of a Queensland property developer in 1987, and originally floated on the Great Barrier Reef. It is commemorated in model form in the Townsville Maritime Museum.
A succinct enunciation of Star Trek' 'Prime Directive'
I need a piece of material for a classroom exercise which involves some succinct explanation of the 'prime directive' in the Star Trek franchise (with which I'm very unfamiliar). Ideally it would be Kirk explaining it interestingly and theatrically, but any bit of video or text, that I could show or read to my class, would be useful.
Framing double-sided posters
I've got several double-sided posters, A3 sized, which I'd like to frame for display so that they could be regularly turned around.
Is this a Chinese or Japanese character?
I'm fairly sure this thing I saw this morning is going to be a vertical growing tower for plants. Is it also a Chinese or Japanese character? If it is, what is it?
It's Time For This American Life To Grow Up
What is this mock-Gaelic limerick I am thinking of?
There's a famous limerick I'm after which I suspect was the work of a major or minor Irish poet. It mocks the Gaelicisation of Irish place names and has a last line which goes (Anglicised) something like "which makes driving in Ireland so dreary".
How do motorcyclists and cyclists around the world greet each other?
What kinds of different greetings do motorcyclists and cyclists in different parts of the world have for each other when they pass on the road?
Jonathan Keith Idema
Adventurers in Short Shorts
Before Steve Irwin brought short shorts in Australian television documentarism to the world, there were the earworming Leyland Brothers, Malcolm Douglas, the original and literal "Crocodile Hunter" who combined conservationism with cooking, and the dry humourist Alby Mangels, who had his own personal filming curse, interviewed Caribbean drug lords, posed nude (SFW) for Cleo, filmed through minefields and warzones, and filmed more than 80 documentaries.
Five people cover Somebody That I Used To Know on one guitar
Panama Priti Bikes
Canonical works of Spanish-language literature
I'd like to broaden my reading in Spanish, and would like recommendations for books, originally written in Spanish, which are canonical enough to have been on Spanish or Latin American high school reading lists, or canonical enough that someone educated in Spain or Latin America might assume familiarity.