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What exactly is a 🚫 called?
Circles and Slashes.
We see these everywhere. Where did they come from? And what do you call it? Designed by committee. Really unpopular in North America, until a movie legitimized it with an incorrectly drawn example. It’s everywhere telling us what not to do.
The Fundie Baby Voice
"As soon as Senator Katie Britt started speaking,
I knew exactly who she is. She is so many of the pastor's wives and Sunday School teachers I knew growing up in an Evangelical church. Be sweet. Obey."
The Getty Makes 88,000 Art Images Free to Use However You Like
The Getty museum has released a huge trove of images under a CC0 license (essentially waiving copyright). Images can be downloaded in high resolution.
The best Othello app I've found.
There are thirty Reversi (also known by the trademark name Othello) board game apps in the Google Play store. This is the best one and you can play it here in your browser. No ads, no trackers, no in-app purchases. It's a web app (the mobile app just opens the website.) A simple user interface with a minimalist approach to configurations. Completely free and open source. Written in Rust and TypeScript by Nate Stringham. Othello is a simple game but widely explored in computer science.
Those eyes do look like something you see right before you die
90s Time Traveler Discovers Apple Vision Pro [5:14 YT] Another series by Pitch Meeting’s Ryan George. (Seriously, the eyes are creepy so be prepared.)
How do Dudes Pee?
Hell Gate writer Esther Wang shares a Slack discussion “as a public service, so that no cis man will ever clown you for assuming, as I did, that they don't want to get piss on themselves when they pee.”
The game is not entirely historically accurate
The Oregon Trail is not just a game, it's a cherished piece of gaming history that transported players to a bygone era of exploration and survival.
The Second Haitian Revolution?
The nation of Haiti has been rocked by far more than its fair share of disasters in recent decades, from major hurricanes to a devastating 2010 earthquake (which killed upwards of 200,000) to the lingering effects of the COVID pandemic. The humanitarian situation has been worsened by escalating political instability, with the "legal banditry" of President Martelly followed by the 2021 assassination of President Moïse amidst a wave of mass protests and criminal violence. The ongoing turmoil reached a fever pitch this week as gang leader Jimmy "Barbecue" Chérizier led an audacious jailbreak of the country's prisons, freeing thousands of convicts that have joined forces in a united front that controls most of Port-au-Prince and credibly threatens to overthrow the government. Acting president Ariel Henry (himself a prime suspect in Moïse's murder) remains stranded outside the country, having secured a deployment of Kenyan police to bolster a multinational force. Most Haitian citizens, however, oppose foreign intervention -- understandable after the last UN mission triggered a major cholera epidemic. The Biden administration is allegedly pressuring the embattled Henry to resign (an improvement over the last time the US was involved in Haitian politics). For their part, a coalition of Haitian civil society offers a possible solution in the Montana Accord, a multi-stage plan to restore electoral democracy.
¡¡CERVEZA CRISTAL!!
In the past week or so, the internet has suddenly become incredibly aware of a unique approach to sponsorship taken around twenty years ago, when a beer company in Chile sponsored TV broadcasts of the Star Wars trilogy with no commercial breaks. Instead, they inserted small, subtle edits for product placement along the way from time to time. Needless to say, people have been enjoying riffing on this particular theme.
Happy World Book Day!
Changing lives through a love of books and reading
What's your favourite source of legal and free ebooks ?
There are more dead men than living women in the funny pages
Major newspapers restructure their comics pages and guess who's missing? The answer will probably not surprise you, but it's disheartening anyway.
Happy DMA enforcement to those who celebrate
Enforcement of the Digital Markets Act began today in Europe. The Verge covers how various big "gatekeeper" tech companies have adjusted or augmented the services they provide in Europe, and in some cases globally, to comply with the law, which among other things, mandates new requirements for data portability and sharing between services owned by different companies, and limits on sharing data between services owned by the same company. This new regulation targets six tech giants, all of which have publicized at least some of their plans and intentions to adjust their offerings to align with the new law in public statements (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft). But as the deadline to comply has approached there's also been a fair amount of sniping, as well as some questionable decisions and outages possibly caused by last-minute DMA-related updates to services.
Believe it or not, people once actually talked about Generation X
Okay, so there's a bug in the bottom corner and a timecode and a pesky watermark, but this MTV News special feature about Generation X from 1991 [50m] is still pretty amazing. Narrated by Kurt Loder.
So you like to place workers
"Some of the most heated debates on online forums involve definitions. What is a Euro game? What is a medium-heavy game? What constitutes “too much luck.” The definition of worker placement is no exception."
I had to wash my hands
Bert Stiles (1920-1944) was a writer of short stories who began flying B17 Flying Fortress missions into Europe with the USAAF in April 1944. He was killed in November the same year. His memoirs were published by his mother as Serenade for the Big Bird (1947UK/1952US). Here's a 5 minute excerpt read at the Cambridge American Cemetery by a British WWII history buff. Google Books:Text starts "There are all kinds of people, senators and whores and barristers, and bankers and dishwashers . . ." [cw: next sentence contains a MeFi-banned slur]
The Lost Universe: NASA's First TTRPG Adventure
The Lost Universe (science.nasa.gov, 03/04/2024): "A dark mystery has settled over the city of Aldastron on the rogue planet of Exlaris. Researchers dedicated to studying the cosmos have disappeared, and the Hubble Space Telescope has vanished from Earth's timeline. Only an ambitious crew of adventurers can uncover what was lost. Are you up to the challenge? This adventure is designed for a party of 4-7 level 7-10 characters and is easily adaptable for your preferred tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) system." Adventure design by Christina Mitchell. Graphic design by Michelle Belleville.
There would be no safety in this film
There are no rules on literary adaptation. You’re trying to keep the plot. And obviously there are key plot things that we do keep. And we keep almost all the dialogue: apart from one big scene, with the secretary and the date, almost all the dialogue’s from the book. Because I think Brett has a great ear for dialogue. But as a novel, American Psycho is quite experimental. It’s very slippery. It shifts unexpectedly from first person to third person. It’ll go from something very realistic into a sort of dreamscape or something very hallucinatory. from On adapting ‘American Psycho’ by Mary Harron [LRB]
I stayed loyal to the poppy seeds.
Purim, the Jewish Carnivale/celebration of averted genocide/celebration of violent revenge, is fast approaching. It's a complicated story that brings up complicated feelings, and usually we only tell the fun parts to our children and focus on dressing up in costumes, having fun with noisemakers, getting so drunk we can't tell the good guys from the bad guys, and arguing about whether Hamantaschen are actually decent cookies or not.
Let's do that last one!
What’s More Unsettling? The Prospect of 2024 or Another Ghost Story?
It’s early 2024, nights are shortening (at least in the northern hemisphere), and here’s another roundup of weird audio dramas to take your mind off other horrors. While these roundups are, of course, invaluable, you might want to check out the Audio Drama Directory as a searchable guide to audio dramas and actual plays (mostly SF, Fantasy, and/or Horror).
sure that the truest thing you know is what is getting your attention
daniel schmactenberger on the metacrisis. [slyt]
"why is it that no literally no country, no company, in the world wants climate change. no nobody is like climate change is the world that I want, but we're orienting to it so fast and we can't stop and nobody can stop it because we all want stuff that requires energy that is driving that thing and nobody wants species Extinction and nobody really wants to live in a world with automated AI weapons but we're all racing to build them so what is actually driving the world to a world that literally nobody wants I think there's a deeper analysis of that and the market is a part of it"
Laurie Anderson is always a few years ahead
Laurie Anderson has been working and playing with a model of her late husband for years. The results, Anderson says, can be hit and miss. “Three-quarters of it is just completely idiotic and stupid. And then maybe 15% is like, ‘Oh?’. And then the rest is pretty interesting. And that’s a pretty good ratio for writing, I think.”
Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams: Autofac
Society and the world as we know it has collapsed. A small band of humans must now contend with a massive, automatic factory that continuously produces products while using up what little resources are left.
Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams: Real Life
The lines of reality become blurred between Sarah, a policewoman in the future, and George, a brilliant game designer.
Liberty (Emu) City
LiMu Emu (and Doug) get dirty. [SLYT]
Saturday Night Live cut this sketch for time but you should make some time to watch it.
the insatiable desire to swerve
'After not one but two positive reviews a day apart in The New York Times – “a warm, intimate book, a volume of apple-cheeked popular intellectual history” – and an excerpt in The New Yorker, the book vaulted into the NYT bestseller list. It went on to reel in a Pulitzer and a National Book Award. While The Swerve picked up these laurels in the non-fiction category, [...] Greenblatt, in essence, took a small truth and made of it a big falsehood; one that many people, given The Swerve’s critical and commercial success, are inclined to believe.' In a 2023 essay 'The Italian Job', Luke Slattery attempts to set the swerved record straight.
Image generation as fast as you can type
While the generative AI scene is transfixed by trillion-scale chipmakers and bleeding-edge text-to-video models, there's plenty of work being done on simpler, more efficient open-source projects that don't require a datacenter to run. In addition to homebrew-friendly text options like Mistral, Llama, and Gemma, the makers of image generator Stable Diffusion have also experimented recently with SDXL Turbo, a lightweight, streamlined version that can generate complex images significantly faster. Previously, this required a decent graphics card and a complicated install process, or at least registration on a paid service -- but thanks to a free public demo from fal.ai, you can now generate and share constantly updating images yourself in real time, as fast as you can type. The quality may not be quite as good as the state-of-the-art stuff, but DALL-E Mini it ain't. No word on what it's costing the company to host or how long it might last, but for now the real-time responsiveness makes it easier than ever to get an intuitive feel for how modern image diffusers interpret text and what exactly they're capable of.
They Should Have Sent a Porpoise
I asked Gruber himself what he would say to the whales. He said that he has been taking requests. Most people tell him that we should start by saying “Sorry,” for the bloody rampage that was industrial whaling. He agrees. “We pulled the oil out of these animals’ heads,” he said. “We used it to make lipstick.” Perhaps now we can atone. from How First Contact With Whale Civilization Could Unfold [The Atlantic; ungated]
The Lost Meteorite
A giant meteorite has been lost in the desert since 1916—here’s how we might find it
"Captain Gaston Ripert was in charge of the Chinguetti camel corps. One day he overheard a conversation among the chameliers (camel drivers) about an unusual iron hill in the desert. He convinced a local chief to guide him there one night, taking Ripert on a 10-hour camel ride along a "disorienting" route, making a few detours along the way....The 4-kilogram fragment Ripert collected was later analyzed by noted geologist Alfred Lacroix, who considered it a significant discovery. But when others failed to locate the larger Chinguetti meteorite, people started to doubt Ripert's story."
Tarot futures up
Tarot Cards Market to grow by USD 214.34 million from 2021 to 2026 claims yahoo!finance. Over at SCAD's student-run online fashion publication, they're here for it. PW says that "publishers are attuned to the thriving marketplace for guides to the magic of crystals, flowers, elaborate tarot cards, and imaginative oracle decks." Tarot has taken on new meaning in recent times for the RPG world. Finally, Anastasia Murney has things to say about "Tarot as affective cartography in the uneven Anthropocene" [PDF].
The long tail of war
Yesterday, 'one of the largest UK peacetime evacuations' took place in Plymouth, Devon, after an unexploded World War 2 bomb was found in a residential garden.
touchdown
'U.S. lands unmanned Odysseus spacecraft on moon'.
Space.com:"Update for 6:45pm ET: Touchdown! Intuitive Machines that its IM-1 lander Odysseus has landed on the moon and is transmitting a faint, but definite, signal. The exact health of the craft is unclear, but it has landed, Intuitive Machines reports."
After some still unconfirmed problems, "The Odysseus lander is "not dead yet"
'Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lander is aiming for a crater near the moon's south pole. Here's why'
Half-Life Histories
Half-Life Histories (Youtube playlist link) is a mini-documentary series about nuclear and radiological disasters by Youtuber and science educator Kyle Hill. Hill's series covers both well-known and major nuclear accidents and disasters like the Demon Core at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Castle Bravo detonation on Bikini Atoll, and less well-known incidents like what happened when scientist Anatoli Bugorski accidentally put his head in a particle accelerator beam, and the only recorded death from an unknown source of radiation.
The New Tabletop Games Journalism
Rascal News
is a new venture in tabletop games journalism. Building on the 00s' New Games Journalism for videogames, the editors/authors are Lin Codega, Rowan Zeoli, and Chase Carter. A recent interview with Kimi Hughes discusses "How Has Actual Play Changed Game Design?"
MeFi Nonprofit Update 2/19/2024
The board forming the nonprofit for Metafilter met Feb. 1.
Bats, fangs, blood, and gore
"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].
Everyone deserves a good death
I am an artist, and I am a death doula. Part of working with and supporting those who are grieving or dying means that you know how precious and short this life is. You don’t take it for granted and you try not to let small things stop you from taking your dreams seriously every day. That is the phenomenal up side of doing deathwork: it makes me a courageous artist, for whom it’s easier not to compare myself to anyone else, or say that I am not artist enough, and encourages me to exist in the only timeline that matters — mine. from The Importance of Art in a “Good Death” by Brianna L. Hernández in Hyperallergic [CW: death and dying]
Experts, citizen scientists move 40 trapdoor spiders in mass relocation
Experts, citizen scientists move 40 trapdoor spiders in mass relocation
(to keep the spiders safe.) A team of conservationists and volunteers successfully relocate 40 trapdoor spiders across WA's Great Southern. Trapdoor spiders trace their ancestry on Australian land to the time of Gondwana, the supercontinent that existed up until 150 million years ago, setting them apart from many other species of spider.
Their name comes from the burrows they dig, with some able to create a hinged lid cover made of soil, vegetation, and silk.
The rare Cataxia bolganupensis live exclusively in the Porongurup Mountain Range. Scientists know the spiders can live for 40 years, but little else is known about the creatures.
Mary Reynolds: The Other Ark -- Acts of Restorative Kindness
She won the biggest awards in Landscape Gardening, a movie made about her, commissioned for some of the boldest landscaping projects in Ireland. She stopped being a gardener. What happened?
“It’s very simple. I looked out onto my garden. A fox ran across, it was probably winter/spring last year, which isn’t that unusual. Then a couple of hares ran after him, and I thought, well that is unusual. And then a family of hedgehogs. Now, they are nocturnal, so I knew something was going on. I went for a wander and it turns out a digger had gone in across the road. It used to be an acre of gorse, bramble, hawthorn, blackthorn, but someone had cleaned out the whole field to replace it with a garden. I stood there in horror – and realized I’d done this many times in my career."
Dream Theater
Stylish woman walks down neon Tokyo street
/ Space man in a red knit helmet movie trailer
/ Drone view of waves crashing at Big Sur
/ Papercraft coral reef
/ Victoria crowned pigeon with striking plumage
/ Pirate ships battling in a cup of coffee
/ Historical footage of California during the gold rush
/ Cartoon kangaroo disco dances
/ Lagos in the year 2056
/ Stack of TVs all showing different programs inside a gallery
/ White SUV speeds up a steep dirt road
/ Reflections in the window of a train in the Tokyo suburbs
/ Octopus fighting with a king crab
/ Flock of paper airplanes flutters through a dense jungle
/ Cat waking up its sleeping owner demanding breakfast
/ Chinese Lunar New Year celebration
/ Art gallery with many beautiful works of art in different styles
/ People enjoying the snowy weather and shopping
/ Gray-haired man with a beard in his 60s deep in thought
/ Colorful buildings in Burano Italy. An adorable dalmation looks through a window
/ 3D render of a happy otter standing on a surfboard
/ Corgi vlogging itself in tropical Maui
/ Aerial view of Santorini /
OpenAI unveils Sora, a near-photorealistic text-to-video model with unprecedented coherency.
A financial-advice columnist falls for an elaborate scam
The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger
The man on the phone knew my home address, my Social Security number, the names of my family members, and that my 2-year-old son was playing in our living room. He told me my home was being watched, my laptop had been hacked, and we were in imminent danger. “I can help you, but only if you cooperate,” he said. His first orders: I could not tell anyone about our conversation, not even my spouse, or talk to the police or a lawyer.
Tremendous Success and Terrible Failure
"The narrative structure of Gorey Stories is as unconventional as Dracula is predictable. The show creators had difficulty wrapping the show in a recognizable narrative package, trying to present the short stories in a way that brings them together in some sort of whole. There is no discernable narrative [SLPDF]." More on Gorey and Dracula. Gorey and Dracula: playset edition. Gorey: the stage memoir.
Prefer the problems of community to the problems of not having community
An Examination of Non-traditional Friendships.
Ezra Klein talks with Rhaina Cohen in a wide-ranging conversation about Western friendship conventions; how we don't have words for rich platonic friendship; how these friendships can be the basis for healthy child-rearing; the high expectations of marriage culture; the loneliness epidemic.
EZRA KLEIN: What happened to drain so much of the ardor out of friendship? Male friendship and female friendship alike but I think even more male friendship. I think it’s still quite common for female friends to profess a kind of love to each other. It’s not that common for male friends.
"Marry, here's grace and a cod-piece; that's a wise man and a fool."
For a brief moment in the Renaissance, in between the invention of the microscope, printing press, and pencils – along with other technologies that uphold modern society – upper class men were rather preoccupied with erecting another innovation: the codpiece. from How the codpiece flopped [BBC]
At first glance the pivotal scene has nothing sinister about it
"A medievalist's mind can be bizarre to behold. If you had been drudging through a cartulary — a collection of charters copied into a single volume — for the last month, what would you choose to publish:
(a) its complete text, as the last word on the matter;
(b) a simpler calendar, as a guide to its contents;
(c) a ghost story?
If your name is M.R. James, the correct answer is the last one!"
(a) its complete text, as the last word on the matter;
(b) a simpler calendar, as a guide to its contents;
(c) a ghost story?
If your name is M.R. James, the correct answer is the last one!"