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NIMH in iambic pentameter
Be off, ye hopeful mouse, but mind yourself;
Icarus were the friend of honeybees,
On borrowed wings he sought his own relieve,
And in the sun of his exub'rant flight,
His friendships' worth was counted not a mite.
A lost play of Shakespeare? No. Even better! An adaptation of "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" in five acts of blank verse. This is why I love the Internet.
Icarus were the friend of honeybees,
On borrowed wings he sought his own relieve,
And in the sun of his exub'rant flight,
His friendships' worth was counted not a mite.
A lost play of Shakespeare? No. Even better! An adaptation of "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" in five acts of blank verse. This is why I love the Internet.
Back Porch Videos
Back Porch Videos
"Way before the internet and YouTube, there was public access cable television. And so...we proudly present these vintage clips from the 1980's alternative music video show, "Back Porch Video." Premiering January 28, 1984, this pioneering program was crewed and hosted by high-school students from the Dearborn/Detroit, Michigan area. Stay tuned for the ultimate best (and ultimate tacky) in retro-80's videos - from pop alternative, to hair bands, to rock and some of the most exclusive hardcore!!!"
Almost 700 videos of post punk brilliance.
"Sharkey's Day" by Laurie Anderson:
Rare Iggy and the Stooges - MC5 Footage:
"Beat Box" by Art of Noise:
"Kiss Me on the Bus" by The Replacements:
"Our Lips are Sealed" by Funboy Three:
"Let Me Be Your Pirate" by Nena:
"Rainy Season" by Howard DeVoto:
"Save it For Later" by the English Beat:
"Boys in the Street" by Eddie Grant:
"Too Loud" by Robert Plant Student Video
Talking Heads, Rome 1980
Pretend it's 1980. Let's also imagine that you are in Rome, and for whatever reason you have decided to go see this musical group called The Talking Heads.
At the concert, these are the songs that the band plays: Psycho Killer; Stay Hungry; Cities; I Zimbra; Drugs; Take Me to the River; Crosseyed and Painless; Life During Wartime; Houses in Motion; Born under Punches; and The Great Curve.
At the concert, these are the songs that the band plays: Psycho Killer; Stay Hungry; Cities; I Zimbra; Drugs; Take Me to the River; Crosseyed and Painless; Life During Wartime; Houses in Motion; Born under Punches; and The Great Curve.
All the Kirk you can eat
Free Star Trek. The only Star Trek that matters -- the ones with Kirk, Spock, Bones, and the rest.
Poem as Comic Strip
Poetry's turn to go graphic.
The Poetry Foundation has invited a few graphic novelists to illustrate poems from its archive. Via.
How do I make visitors laugh at the expense of my kitty?
I need a funny saying for a sign that will go in a window. It will hang over my fat cat, who hardly moves. I know you guys can come up with something great.
Custom Monkey Drawings & More
Illustrator Apelad has many various projects & flickrsets, including the fairly well known Laugh Out Loud Cats & the Hodgman inspired Hobo Names project, but some of the lesser known ones are awesome as well, including this set of images created for common HTTP Errors, this Alphabet of Monsters, and a personal favorite, Monkey!, wherein users send in a monkey description and receive in return a drawing.
A Howl that went unheard for over 50 years
For more than 50 years, it was believed that the first recording Allen Ginsberg made of Howl was in Berkeley in March 1956. Now, an earlier recording – made on Valentine's Day 1956 at Reed College, Portland, Oregon – has been found. Reed have made it – along with seven other poems Ginsberg read the same night – available here. (Click on "Allen Ginsberg reads ..." for drop down menu; apologies for crappy quicktime interface.)
The Yankee King of Spain
Acquitted of the murder of Francis Scott Key's son by the first successful pleading of temporarily insane? Check. Civil War Union general? Check. Medal of Honor winner? Check. Amputated leg on display to the public? Check. Lover to the deposed Queen of Spain? Check. Ladies and Gentlemen, I introduce you to Major General, Foreign Minister, and Congressman Daniel Edgar Sickles.
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
A Neutral Milk Hotel cover, and the first studio recording with my new group. Coming soon to your town!
1,780 Cult-Movies Online
1,780 Cult Movies Online
~ A huge repository of online movies described as cult classics.
Do the loco-motion with me.
Perepiteia. Thane Heins, who named his invention after a Greek word meaning an action that "has the opposite effect to that intended," has perhaps created a...perpetual motion machine. His 20-year obsession has broken up his marriage and lost him custody of his two young daughters. Contraption stumps MIT professor. Is it a hysteresis brake? Or a scam. YOU decide.
Hide an image in html
Hide an image in html
... a neat CSS trick. Highlight the block of text at the bottom of the page as if you were going to cut & paste it.
On we sweep with thrashing oar...
Hail San Franciscans. I will be landing on your shores bringing you a message of goodwill from the Rhine delta people. Let's engage in the ancient ritual of raising glasses of beer to signal the friendly relations between our nations.
Or to put it differently: I'll be in SF soon and I'd like to buy you a beer. And I'm sure you have plenty to catch up with each other too.
Double-post complaint
I loath repeat posts as much as the next guy, but it seems a lot of them could be avoided if the original poster were more clear.
Last night, for instance, someone re-posted the swastika-tree story. People rightly pointed out that it had been posted before. But look at the original post: "I bet this slice of German history has put the local Greens in quite a dilemma." And that's it. Unless you follwed the link, you'd have no idea what it was about.
Here's another example: "YASL: Yet another Salon link. This could be the smoking gun. Or just smoke. Judgement?" This describes just about every Salon story, and I would not blame anyone for inadvertantly re-posting.
We should expect posters to be familiar with what's been posted lately. However, it's too much to demand that people click through every link. Let's be clear and complete (but not too complete, of course) and leave the riddles, enigmas and teasers on our own weblogs.
Last night, for instance, someone re-posted the swastika-tree story. People rightly pointed out that it had been posted before. But look at the original post: "I bet this slice of German history has put the local Greens in quite a dilemma." And that's it. Unless you follwed the link, you'd have no idea what it was about.
Here's another example: "YASL: Yet another Salon link. This could be the smoking gun. Or just smoke. Judgement?" This describes just about every Salon story, and I would not blame anyone for inadvertantly re-posting.
We should expect posters to be familiar with what's been posted lately. However, it's too much to demand that people click through every link. Let's be clear and complete (but not too complete, of course) and leave the riddles, enigmas and teasers on our own weblogs.
Shakesborg ~ Automated Rhyming Lyricist
This is one of those projects on which I spent way-too-much time, and probably won't make me wealthy unless I time-travel back to the late 1500's shadow writing for talentless nobles. ShakesBorg is a poem/song generator which allows you to choose rhyme and meter of various types. It uses various forms of approximate and internal rhyme and has been known at times to be precognizant.
Feel free to add your favorite rhyme schemes or generated poems to the Wiki (but please be gentle on the server since ShakesBorg is only approximating its optimal algorithm due to the unavailability of quantum computing coprocessors).
Digitizing the letters of Samuel Johnson
The library where I work owns half of all the surviving correspondence of Samuel Johnson, and we've begun a project to digitize our collection. So far we've done the first 60 of the 132 folders. Click on the main link for a post on my blog with more information, or go directly to the finding aid, and scroll down to the letters which say "Click for color digital facsimile". I'd be interested to hear any feedback on the experience of using the site.
Of Man's First Disobedience
John Milton
was born 400 years ago this year, and several excellent websites have been created to mark the anniversary. Two online exhibitions, Citizen Milton and Living At This Hour, celebrate Milton's achievement with a display of early editions and later artistic interpretations, while Darkness Visible offers an accessible introduction to Paradise Lost for readers encountering the poem for the first time, including an interesting discussion of Milton's influence on Philip Pullman (who responds here with his own tribute to Paradise Lost, 'the greatest poem by England's greatest public poet').
X-IE-VERSION-FREEZE
It slipped through the cracks on my radar, but apparently the IE8 team has met with some web standards gurus and decided that in order to move forward with full standards compliance (and support the known quirks of IE6/7 for corporate intranets), a new "version targeting" system should be put in place. Other browser vendors are not amused. Should IE just give up?
A Year in Comics
I'm drawing a page of comics once a day for the rest of the year. Most of them so far are autobiographical—things that have happened to me on that particular day. They're somewhat crude, but the quality is guaranteed to improve. They're also viewable as this Flickr set.
Comics are usually posted late in the day, because I don't manage my time well.
Short Stories by Roberto Bolaño
7 short stories by Roberto Bolaño Gómez Palacio, The Insufferable Gaucho, Álvaro Rousselot’s Journey, Phone Calls, Dance Card. From Nazi Literature in the Americas: Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce, Luz Mendiluce Thompson & Ernesto Pérez Masón and The Fabulous Schiaffino Boys. If you know the fiction of Roberto Bolaño you know what you're in for. If you don't, any of these stories is a good place to start, though the first three are perhaps the most natural starting points.
Better than "Choose Your Own Adventure"
Project Aon
is the internet-based revival of the Lone Wolf series of fantasy gamebooks, first published in 1984 and now in the process of being released online (with the authour's blessing); also available is an atlas, colouring book, and graphic novel. There is also a new traditional RPG being published in dead-tree form.
Now if they'd just move back to Boston
Atlantic Magazine opens its archives.
Atlantic Magazine announced today that they will drop subscriber-only access to the site, giving full access to every issue of the last 12 years.
Where to start? Well, I particularly recommend David Foster Wallace's fascinating examination of right-wing talk radio (DFW trademark footnotes intact),
Hitler's Forgotten Library, and Eric Schlosser's The Prison-Industrial Complex. (via)
Metafilter Infodump: more stats than you can shake a stick at.
Nerds, start your engines: it's the new Metafilter Infodump.
It's that time of year - free games all around.
It seems that everyone wants to post their toplists for free game recommendations at the moment. First up is Gnomes' Lair with 100 excellent free games in bloom. Can't forget 1up with 101 Free Games 2008. And last but still well worth checking out is Indiegames' (formerly Indygamer) Best Freeware Arcade Games 2007 and Best Freeware Adventure Games 2007. If that isn't enough for you, also worth taking a gander at is Javet's Freeware Game of the Day thread on Tigsource.
Brains in Space!
Are We All Really Just Disembodied Brains Floating in Empty Space?
Recent mathematical results in the field of cosmology related to the Boltzmann's Brain Problem may point toward a peculiarly arbitrary universe in which, as improbable as it sounds, it's more likely than not.
The Fallout 2 Restoration Project
"The purpose of this mod is to add back into the game all the content that was originally planned by the Fallout 2 devs."
Over the last 2 years an industrious chap has "gone through almost all the text files and scripts and compiled a list of what appears to have been pulled from the game," in order to restore it to it's originally intended glory and now his work is complete. Enjoy.
Lasagna Cat
Faithful live-action recreations of "classic" Garfield comic strips.
(Quicktime required.)
Management cannot guarantee the sanity of the listener.
You desire to listen to "The Shadow Out of Time". You may also desire to listen to adaptations of The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Colour Out of Space. Possibly you desire to listen to Neil Gaiman's Lovecraftian Sherlock Holmes pastiche A Study in Emerald, the text of which is available in a fetchingly formatted PDF. Or maybe it's all academic, and you'd rather just listen to some lectures about Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
MeFi Navigator
Mefi Navigator (annotated screenshot) is a handy GreaseMonkey script that makes navigating MetaFilter threads a bit easier.
A picture tells a thousand words - look at the screenshot! Here's a description anyway:
The main thing it does is to add a dropdown box (and forward and back arrows) next to each comment which allows you to go directly to the user's other comments in the thread. It marks comments from an admin or the original poster. Also, a little 'back to top' arrow is added to each comment. If you have any problems, email me at mefinavigator at googlemail dot com.
playing with the tuning knobs when the back of the appliance is in flames
The Wire is dissent; it argues that our systems are no longer viable for the greater good of the most, that America is no longer operating as a utilitarian and democratic experiment.
An already-quite-good discussion about The Wire, originating in Mark Bowden's Atlantic article ('The Angriest Man in Television') and continuing through Mark Bowden's post on the show's nihilistic bleakness gets even more interesting on Matt Yglesias's blog, where the creator of the show stops by to give his opinion on what it's all supposed to mean.
32 days without a smoke. Now what?
I haven't smoked in over a month. How can I inspire myself to extend that indefinitely?
Make sure to clean your logfiles.
Ever admired those hard-working hackers, toiling away to get you the programs you've always loathed to have? Have you ever dreamt of exploring the innards of someone else's computer but have held back due to those pesky legalities? If you said yes to either of the above questions or just want to play an online hacking simulation, then SlaveHack is the website for you.
fewer books, more forum
The bookforum site deserves to be brought to the attention of right thinking MeFis everywhere. It like a collection of really good front page posts: annotated collections of 10 or so links from disparate sources on a common theme.
Books similar to "The Prestige"
I am looking for books similar in style with Christopher Priest's "The Prestige". What i want is complex stories, epistolary in structure where the plot has to be puzzeled together by the reader.
20 years of line noise and here's to 20 more
#!/usr/bin/perl
@d = localtime(time);
if ($d[4] == 11 && $d[3] == 18 ) {
print "Happy ".($d[5]-87)."th Birthday, Perl!\n";
}
if( $ARGV[0] eq "love" || $ARGV[0] eq "hate" ) {
print "$you can't deny its contribution to our culture\n";
}
Maybe she likes Wittgenstein...
The Most Wanted Song
- Finally, thanks to Ubuweb, Komar & Melamid's Most Wanted and Most Unwanted Songs (recorded in 1997) are now available online! Komar & Melamid have been featured on Metafilter before for The Most and Least Wanted Paintings. Thanks WMFU!
End of youth?
When was 'the end' of your youth?
What experience most shaped who you are?
Life-altering experiences. Can you point to a single experience in your life, as a child, which you can define as having contributed to the person you are today? (+)
Richard Beymer's Twin Peaks photos
Photographs taken on the set of Twin Peaks
by Richard Beymer (who played Benjamin Horne).
For those of us who enjoy coffins
Capsule hotels (or modular hotels , if you prefer) are all the rage these days. They started in Japan in the 1980s, but have only recently spread elsewhere to places like England. They aren't the cushiest digs you'll find, but they're a cheap no-frills alternative, and they're getting better all the time.
Radio to the People
The Prometheus Radio Project
focuses on building a large community of low power FM stations and listeners. Co-founder Pete Tridish (interview) and Prometheus won a major victory recently as the FCC Moved to Protect Low-Power FM Stations. Check out a couple short films about Prometheus "barn raisings," or launching small community radio stations in Woodburn, Or, Nashville, TN and (especially fascinating) Arusha, Tanzania.
Mushrooms vs. the Oil Spill
DIY activists have been using human hair mats to soak up the carcinogenic bunker oil that's been washing onto Bay Area beaches since the spill. Now they're inoculating the oil-soaked mats with mushrooms that will break down the oil into harmless compost.
See also: fungi breaking down plastics, synthetic dyes and organopollutants generally.
A bit more from mushroom guru Paul Stamets.
(If you're so inclined, here's a link to donate to the non-profit that coordinated the hair mats.)
Zap, Crackle, and Riot
Before 1969, the city of Zap was best known as the punch line of a joke about three towns in North Dakota that sounded like Rice Krispies—Zap, Gackle, and Mott. But when student body president Charles "Chuck" Stroup at North Dakota State University needed an alternative to Fort Lauderdale while stuck in North Dakota for spring break, he enlisted the help of some student journalists at the Spectrum newspaper to promote the "Zip to Zap," an event that became the only "official" riot in the history of North Dakota. The tiny coal mining town originally looked forward to the impromptu "Zip" festival, which had so much advance buzz that the Wham-O toy company created a toy called Zip Zap in honor of the imminent event. Unfortunately, after throngs of students descended on Zap, the only two bars in town quickly ran out of beer, and the North Dakota National Guard was called into extinguish the bonfire, beer brawls, and riot that ensued. For more info about about how the "Zip to Zap" fit in context with the 1960s zeitgeist, look here, here, and here.
AskMeMus
MusicFilter: interviewing the MefiMusicians.
Give 1 Get 1
One Laptop Per Child - Give 1, Get 1
Started by Nicholas Negroponte, the One Laptop Per Child project aims to put inexpensive durable laptops into the hands of millions of children in developing countries with the idea that the best weapon against poverty is education.
For a limited time, people in the US can buy an OLPC laptop for themselves, and send one to a child in a developing country for $399 via the Give One, Get One program.
Man wins physics (maybe)
An exceptionally simple theory of everything
has been released by a snow and surfboarding physicist. String theorists are grumpy feeling it doesn't have enough dimensions to be a proper theory. Others question and discuss. In it's favour - it's pretty! 10 Mb Quicktime