Favorites from whir
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Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
Also, 2 and 3. NSFW due to a tasteless header image. You'll have to arrange by date and ascending to view them in proper order.
Journey's of Franz K
The Travels of Franz Kafka
, a website that chronicles the many places and social interactions of Franz. A photographic journal collection of his life as he traveled. For your enjoyment, today being the 125th Anniversary of Franz Kafka's birthday. Cheers.
Man, I really hated getting killed by The Farting Sluggoth
A stash of charmingly goofy adventure book covers
from Christopher "MGK" Bird.
Autobiography of Read
Happy Birthday, Anne Carson! The iconoclastic modern poet who published the arresting, compulsively readable Autobiography of Red turned 57 this weekend.
They see me co-opt'n They hatin'
We've discussed fixed gear bicycles before.
The Bicycle Tutor
The Bicycle Tutor
is a site with lots of video tutorials designed with a sole purpose; to teach you how to fix your own bicycle. [via mefi projects]
The Prague Bible
The Prague Bible (1489)
is a splendid three-volume MS of the Tanakh, once in the possession of Enlightenment luminary Moses Mendelssohn. There are several other beautiful examples of medieval and early modern Hebrew MSS online, including the Illuminated Hebrew Manuscripts collection (New York Public Library), the Illuminated Haggadah Exhibit (Klau University), selections from Moses Maimonides' Moreh Nevukim (Leiden University), and the Prato Haggadah (Jewish Theological Seminary). See also the introduction to the Hebraic Collections at the Library of Congress.
The Light The Dead See
30 years ago today, Frank Stanford, a young Arkansaw poet shot himself three times in the heart with a 22-caliber pistol. He was 29. By then he had become a powerful and unique voice in the American poetry landscape, dubbed "a swamprat Rimbaud" by Lorenzo Thomas and "one of the great voices of death" by Franz Wright. He left behind a strong (though often hard to find and/or unrecognized) body of work, most notably his immense epic The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You, a 15,280 line poem with no punctuation or stanzas.
The Unofficial Google Shell
Hey, command-line nerds! You shell geeks over there! Switch over to your browser and go to goosh.org right now.
It's a podcast about nothing!
Looking for some podcasts about nothing, and video games, respectively.
The Apostrophe Engine
A poem that builds upon itself and grows as the world wide web grows. The Apostrophe Engine is a website operated by Bill Kenney and Darren Wershler-Henry. It is the source of the poems in apostrophe, a book published by ECW Press in 2006.
The home page of the Apostrophe Engine site presents the full text of a poem called "apostrophe", written by Bill in 1993. In this digital version of the poem, each line is now a hyperlink.
How it works.
The Hole in the Wall on Top Shelf!
The Hole in the Wall
[via mefi projects] is our own interrobang's surrealistic cat story now being serialized at Top Shelf Comics as part of their new Webcomics section, and it's definitely something special - pen & ink & watercolor adventures of two cats exploring a mysterious and dangerous underground landscape. More comics like this will be posted there depending on the popularity of this one, so if you love art, great comics, or cats, you will want to check it out. This was a part of interrobang's Year in Comics project, so if you fall in love with the Hole in the Wall kittehs (you will!), go have look at his other stuff, as well.
TIME FOR MORE STORIES
Last night, I spent an hour reading the crazy, hilarious stories posted here. One hour was not enough. I need more davesecretaryatwork - or at least, more like him.
Extremely minimal workout
My question is pretty simple.
Is it possible to get definition and tone using only push-ups and crunches?
I cycle everyday for cardio (and practicality), but I'm looking to work my upper body more without investing in a gym membership or weights.
Basically I'm looking for a good toning/muscle-building workout using nothing other than my own body.
If this is possible, does anyone have some good routines to suggest?
Chinese Poems
Chinese Poems
is a simple, no frills site with over 200 classical Chinese poems, mostly from the Tang period. The poems are presented in traditional and simplified chinese characters, pinyin and English translation, both literal and literary. Here's Du Mu's Drinking Alone:
Outside the window, wind and snow blow straight,
I clutch the stove and open a flask of wine.
Just like a fishing boat in the rain,
Sail down, asleep on the autumn river.
Among other poets featured are Li Bai (a.k.a. Li Po), Du Fu and Wang Wei. As a bonus, here's the entire text of Ezra Pound's Cathay, most of whom are from Li Bai originals.
Outside the window, wind and snow blow straight,
I clutch the stove and open a flask of wine.
Just like a fishing boat in the rain,
Sail down, asleep on the autumn river.
Among other poets featured are Li Bai (a.k.a. Li Po), Du Fu and Wang Wei. As a bonus, here's the entire text of Ezra Pound's Cathay, most of whom are from Li Bai originals.
3.14159265... and 99,992 digits to go!
Exercising your brain makes you smarter, and there is no better gym for it than the MentatWiki.
The Black Cab Sessions
Death Cab For Cutie. Live, in a Black Cab.
One Song ("No Sunlight"). One Take. One Cab.
Also: Daniel Johnston, Bill Callahan, The New Pornographers, The Raveonettes, Okkervil River, Spoon, & The Futureheads.
Also: Daniel Johnston, Bill Callahan, The New Pornographers, The Raveonettes, Okkervil River, Spoon, & The Futureheads.
...even after five agonizing years of the Iraq War, a summer blockbuster isn't prepared to say that not only is its action hero is corrupt, he's corrupt because America has become corrupt.
Iron Man, who represents an imperial America, can only win Pyrrhic victories.
Spencer Ackerman of Tapped Online has a nice history of the Iron Man comics that reads the character's alcoholism, Civil-War overzealousness, and persistent blundering "into a hell of unintended consequences" as a symbol and subtle critique of American exceptionalism and what Jonathan Schell among others has called "impotent omnipotence".
Cycling to work, how do you manage clothes?
I'm looking for tips from people who ride a bike to work. I have the bike, and the work, what I'm looking for are the practicalities of coping with the sweatiness; showering, changing, keeping clothes at work, or travelling with them.
Photobombing
Photobombing
n 1. The fine art of ruining other people's photographs. cf. n 2. The utterly pointless act of attaching printed photographs to public places, objects and buildings for random strangers to find.^ [Main link via, with cooler text commentary. This and first link NSFW.]
Home of the Brave
Laurie Anderson live in concert - 1984;
Sharkey's Night:
Language is a Virus:
Talk Normal:
Langue D'amour:
Sharkey's Day:
Gravity's Angel:
Radar:
Kokoku:
How to Write:
Late Show:
Excellent Birds:
Zero and One
The Invention of the Letter
-- a rare hand-drawn book by Beat poet and Zen teacher Philip Whalen. Though lesser-known than his peers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, Whalen was a wonderful and subtle poet who was also one of the first Americans to study Zen in Japan. (He appears in Kerouac novels like The Dharma Bums under pseudonyms like Warren Coughlin and Ben Fagin, "a quiet, bespectacled booboo, smiling over books.") He met Gary Snyder and Lew Welch at Reed College, where he studied calligraphy with the illustrious Lloyd Reynolds. While in Kyoto in 1966, Whalen sketched out a charming fable about the invention of language in the Garden of Eden that was eventually published by pioneering communard Irving Rosenthal and given away for free at a 1968 reading in San Francisco. The Invention of the Letter has since become extremely scarce and is now available online for curious scholars and Beat fellow travelers.
Dave Sim is not... no, wait... actually he is.
Comic book author Dave Sim is shocked, shocked, that anyone might have gotten the impression from his own words that he is a misogynist. So he's sent out a form letter saying that he'll only talk to people who will sign an online petition or send him an letter affirming that it's not so. Hilarity ensues.
The Modernist Journals Project
The Modernist Journals Project
collects literary arts journals from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including both issues of Wyndham Lewis' Vorticist manifesto Blast, the first ten years of Poetry magazine (with Amy Lowell, T.S. Eliot, G.K. Chesterton and foreign correspondent Ezra Pound), topical essays, the Virginia Woolf-inspired December 1910 Project, the amazing proto-dada zine Le Petit Journal des Réfusées and a searchable biographical database of famous and not so famous artists and writers.
'I think there is a good future for this type of system...'
A new generation of bike rental is here, where you pick up the bike where you start your ride and drop it off at the destination. Vélib' and Vélo'V are the high-profile, wildly successful products of the JCDecaux ad firm in the cities of Paris and Grand Lyon. Velib' provides 10,000 bikes for cheap hourly rental beginning this past summer. In exchange for fully underwriting the €90 million of expenses, JCDecaux wins exclusive rights to all the city's billboards. JCDecaux' rival Clear Channel beat them out of the gate by a couple months, opening Bicing in Barcelona to similar success, although at a smaller scale.
Nexus War 2.0
The Straylight release
of Nexus War, a browser based PvP MMO in the vein of Urban Dead (thought significantly more complex) and Kingdom of Loathing (thought significantly more serious in tone), occurred today. It brings with it a host of changes, new skills, upgrades, and expansions, shaking things up for the old player base and making it an ideal time for new players to join, both because the status quo is being rewritten and because of a vastly expanded in game help menu.
Coming soon: The Residents, but for now.... Eugene Chadbourne!
I've always lumped musician Eugene Chadbourne in with the likes of Wesley Willis and Daniel Johnston, but I may have been mistaken. While his songs are often absurd, experimental, and silly, he's much less eccentric than I'd always thought. In addition to having an incredible output (full discography with notes here and in-depth review here), he has worked with everyone from John Zorn to Jello Biafra, even fronting the band Camper Van Beethoven as Camper Van Chadbourne. He has also been a writer for MaximumRocknRoll and AMG and is the inventor of the electric rake (a musical instrument that would certainly annoy your neighbors). YouTube has two awesome Chadbourne finds: THIS is a 19-minute documentary about him and THIS is a cable access show he appeared on called I'm Going to Make a Drug with My Mind (if you like cable access television, this is awesome, but please note that this video is 31-minutes long, including 60 seconds of color bars. Eugene comes on a little after the 17-minute mark). [WARNING: YouTube. A lot of YouTube in this post]
Pulp Shakespeare
from ACT I SCENE 4
J: Your pardon; did I break thy concentration?
Continue! Ah, but now thy tongue is still.
Allow me then to offer a response.
Describe Marsellus Wallace to me, pray.
J: Your pardon; did I break thy concentration?
Continue! Ah, but now thy tongue is still.
Allow me then to offer a response.
Describe Marsellus Wallace to me, pray.
At least as interesting as a one-link-to-wikipedia post.
Max/MSP is a graphical programming environment primarily used for music, video and multimedia. Max/MSP has sometimes been described as a digital erector set. David Tinapple describes Max in this way: "it's like you're drawing a diagram of what you want the program to do, and then when you're done drawing the diagram you've also sort of accidentally programmed it".
MeFi Xbox Gamers
Calling all MeFi Xbox360 gamers. I'm going to maintain an Xbox gamertag for us to make it easy to find other Mefites to game with using the Friends of a Friend feature on Live.
Everybody needs a mux.
Can we add muxtape to the social apps list on profile pages (and of course to the keen new social explorer)? I'd love to keep track of the mefi-mixes.
Literature Isn't Dead, It Just Smells Funny
Those big, wonderful book blogs like Paper Cuts, Guardian Books, and Poetry Foundation haven't totally satisfied your book blog bloodlust?
I've got a bunch of good mixes just waiting to be made.
So it's mid-April already, and I haven't yet heard anything about MefiSwap 2008. So who's in?
Ezra Pound, foreign correspondent to the Richmond News Leader
In 1958, Ezra Pound, after being released from a mental hospital, became a foreign correspondent
for the Richmond News Leader. All but one of his dispatches were deemed unprintable by the editor and the one that was printed ran as a letter to the editor. The Virginia Quarterly Review has put scans of the dispatches up on their site.
Getting started with acoustic guitar.
So, this afternoon I am going to pick up my first guitar. What's the best way to get started?
Audio as Visual
The intersect of data visualization and aural phenomena is a fascinating space, from simple chartings of the history of sampling to mapping the entire world of music (or even just electronica). Pop songs become sketches, iTunes libraries become twisted geometric forms, and last.fm listening behaviors form coloured orbs and waves. The collaborative networks of comtemporary rappers, jazz musicians, and classical composers are revealing of specific and meaningful community structures. Explore the algorithmic music of Stephan Wolfram's computational universe, listen to pi or e or the Mona Lisa or the weather or the temperature in New York City, discover the shape of sound, or just, you know, see music.
Use the Echo Nest to visualize your own music (example), tag your music collection with colours, or just wade through the plethora of ways to map connections between artists and genres. (several previously)
Tilling Word and Land
Wendell Berry is an agrarian writer, poet, and Mad Farmer. Perhaps most famous for his decision not to buy a computer, which stirred some controversy, Berry is an anti-war, anti-state, anti-capitalist, conservationist conservative.
Food For The Soul
Great Poets Of The 20th Century.
From The Guardian so Brit bias... Introduction, William Boyd on Siegfried Sassoon, John Banville on Seamus Heaney, Jeanette Winterson on Ted Hughes, Andrew Motion on Philip Larkin, Margaret Drabble on Sylvia Plath, Rowan Williams on WH Auden, Craig Raine on T.S. Eliot.
Things you never thought you could do with your camera
One of the most amazing user-led projects out there, CHDK firmware turns cheap Canon cameras into photography powerhouses. You can take take time-lapse movies as in this stunning sunset example; automatically photograph lightening; easily make pretty HDR images and stereograms; have unlimited depth-of-field; and, perhaps most impressively, take photographs with shutter speeds of 1/60,000 of a second!
Things Vital to the Honor of Human Life
The editor of the New York Times Book Review asks
"do others have favorite signature passages in books they love — a sentence or two that seem to convey the essence of a complex, beautiful work?" after giving his own example from To The Finland Station. Hundreds respond, often with some wonderful passages (as well as some not so wonderful ones). Any examples from the hive mind?
