Favorites from Kattullus
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Time Is Shaped Like a Labyrinth
Mr. Samuel's Teatime Stories for Good Kids & Confused Adults is a short film in 4 parts by Yara Asmar, a musician, puppeteer, and filmmaker from Beirut. The creator describes it so: "In a wonky universe set within the fake walls of an old abandoned children’s TV show, Mr Samuel and his friends -peculiar, ugly puppets navigating the strange thing that is time- attempt to make sense of it all through stories, songs and arduous loops of nonsensical chores."
"I didn’t realize how important it is not to tell the truth"
The Bloggess (Jenny Lawson) has posted about finding art made by a woman, Laura Perea, who was in a psychiatric hospital from the 1940s. She describes what she has discovered about Laura Perea's life and family, and reproduces her art, in three posts: Help me solve a haunting art mystery?; Art mystery possibly solved?; Uncovering the mystery of L. Perea and trying to erase the stigma of mental illness. Content warning: death by suicide of one of Laura Perea's family members.
Suck it, Lichtenstein!
I cannot tell you how or why, but at some point a few years back I discovered that Instagram Stories not only allows you unlimited emojis, it ALSO allows you to enlarge them to an apparently infinite degree. And so, may I present: FAMOUS PAINTINGS RECREATED USING ONLY EMOJIS! All on one page: Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son. Klimt's The Kiss, Wood's American Gothic, Michaelangelo's The Creation of Adam and more, all moulded from shaded yellow spheres.
If you need it, give me a hug or stop for a chat
(CW for talk of suicide) A short film (on X) made by Wolverhampton Wanderers FC. The club's Head 4 Health initiative.
public domain [book cover] atrocities
[B]ooks in the public domain—books anyone with a digital file, a printer, and a dream can produce and sell—can be a sweet side hustle for people looking to make a quick buck, and they are free to make their own choices when it comes to the cover art they select, but this one cracked me up because it is not even close to representing the contents or the tone of the book. I decided to do a deep dive into the world of public domain publishing, to see what else was out there… (Karen T. Brissette) Bonus: 50 Very Bad Book Covers for Literary Classics (LitHub)
Cascading Style
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a ubiquitous markup language for describing the layout and design of a webpage separate from the content, typically specifying things like text formatting, background color, page alignment, etc.
But as with emoticons and ASCII art before it, CSS can be repurposed to become the content. Enter CSS drawing, an intricate art form that uses the conventions of the language to create illustrations and even animation using only standard design elements. Some standout examples from around the web: A Single Div, where every new illustration is contained within one <div> tag; designer Lynn Fisher also has a previous version along with a whole catalog of "weird websites, niche data projects, and CSS experiments" - Another collection of single-div projects - Start a digital bonfire - The Simpsons (animated!) in CSS - 173 CSS drawings on Dribble - How I started drawing CSS Images - css-doodle, a web component for drawing patterns with CSS - Creating Realistic Art with CSS - The CSS Zen Garden, a collection of beautiful CSS stylesheets - CSS previously on MeFi
Abbott Elementary: Career Day Part 1
Welcome back to a new school year. Janine's got plans. Ava's got a new outlook. We get to meet some of the people from the school district.
The most significant hip hop feud in decades
Kendrick Lamar and Drake (aka Aubrey Graham), two of the biggest active hip hop artists and former collaborators, are seriously beefing in a major way that hasn't been seen since Tupac vs Biggie. Last October, Drake dropped a track, First Person Shooter, where his collaborator J Cole named the two of them and Kendrick as "the big three". Kendrick, who has a competitive streak, took umbrage at being put on the same level as the other two and replied in Like That "it's just big me". What might've started as a somewhat professional competition has rapidly gone nuclear since Kendrick took shots at Drake's Blackness, fitness as a parent, and masculinity in his track titled "euphoria" and Drake responded with allegations of domestic abuse, infidelity, and cuckoldry in Family Matters. As of the latest, Kendrick has accused Drake of hiding a 2nd child and being a sexual predator of underaged girls.
"Sounds like Kermit the Frog during a rectal exam."
Waluigi sings "Rainbow Connection." It'll consume two minutes and 44 seconds of your day, but no more than that. That's all. That's enough.
Lady Wray
Debuting as a teenager with the Missy Elliot and Timbaland produced Make it Hot in 1998, a number of shelved projects meant Nicole Wray's next album would take more than a decade to appear as part of a duo with Terri Walker, Lady (2012). That was followed by solo albums Queen Alone (2016) and Piece of Me (2022). Earlier this month, she appeared on Tiny Desk Concerts. There's also an earlier appearance on KEXP.
“Merely a best-selling author in these parts, a rock star in Paris.”
Paul Auster, the prolific novelist, memoirist and screenwriter who rose to fame in the 1980s with his postmodern reanimation of the noir novel and who endured to become one of the signature New York writers of his generation, died of complications from lung cancer at his home in Brooklyn on Tuesday evening. He was 77. [NY Times; ungated]
simultaneously beloved and overlooked
Even as stars among her contemporaries have faded into relative obscurity, Niedecker's poetry pitched resolutely between — between avant-garde experimentalism and ethnopoetics, between the gnomic and the manifest — has sustained, across the decades, stalwart devotion. Her position within the canon of twentieth-century American modernism may seem to be in flux, shifting between various contexts — Objectivism and ecopoetics, white settler colonialism, geological and geopolitical history, the artistic legacies of the New Deal and the Popular Front, midcentury feminism, Thoreauvian hermeticism transplanted to the Midwest. Her work can feel both elusive and profusive, her poetic evolution traced across fugitive volumes produced by tiny presses and now appearing in Selecteds and Collecteds rife with textual variations. In our attempts to locate Lorine Niedecker, we do not seek to pin her down but rather to let loose the frustrating delights and joyful contradictions of her art. from Locating Lorine Niedecker by Brandon Menke and Sarah Dimick
Everyone knows that nobody knows "Everyone Knows That"... until now
For more than two years, the world of lost media has been flummoxed by 17 seconds of grainy audio uploaded to a small name-that-song site. Tentatively titled "Everyone Knows That (Ulterior Motives)" based on the apparent lyrics, the clip's energetic retro 80s vibes defied all attempts by music ID apps and various hive-minds to track it down, soon becoming the holy grail of the "lostwave" community of enthusiasts for obscure unidentified "rare grooves." The search inspired articles, video essays, Youtube and TikTok memes, ambitious reconstructions (including multiple music videos), and whole wikis, but the song itself remained unsolved... until now.
Extensive Desert Lava Tubes Sheltered Humans for 7000 Years
Extensive Desert Lava Tubes Sheltered Humans for 7000 Years, Archaeologists Find. Formed after volcanic activity, the underground caves periodically hosted early humans and their livestock in Saudi Arabia, facilitating cultural exchange.
Our Man Bashir
“ So my editor, and I, would like me to bring Garak into this.” - “ That’s interesting. There is an interesting angle for that.” -
Star Trek’s Alexander Siddig interviewed for Arab-American Heritage Month
Passersby were amazed at the unusually large amounts of synergy
G/O Media, the much-reviled owner of such internet landmarks as Kotaku, Gizmodo, Jalopnik, and The Root, has been selling off their assets recently, including ClickHole (sold to Cards Against Humanity), Lifehacker (Ziff Davis), Deadspin (gutted), Jezebel and the AV Club (Paste). Latest on the auction block is The Onion... who ended up with a surprising buyer: Global Tetrahedron, a name that might ring a few bells for longtime readers. But what does the advent of this ominous conglomerate mean for America's Finest News Source?™
Examining What "Never Again" Means Through the Lens of Magneto
Writing for Defector, Asher Elbein talks about the evolution of the character of Magneto, who is (yet again) back from the dead and the shift of meaning in "Never Again," from inclusive aspiration to its violent modern application.
The six directions: North, South, East, West, Anth and Kenth
On Steam right now is a game that lets you play Mini Golf in four dimensions, called, naturally, 4D Golf (Steam, $20). I don't mean in the sense that time is a fourth dimension, it's set in a fully 4D world: you decide which slice of it is revealed in the visible 3D world at any time. Here's a trailer. (1 1/2 minutes) Here's Youtuber Icely Puzzles playing the beginning of it. (43 minutes) Here's the video devlog. It's from CodeParade, who also made the hyperbolic plane exploration game Hyperbolica. At the end of the release announcement video, its creator mentioned that there is a secret feature in 4D Golf that makes it even more bizarre, but telling its existence is a pretty major spoiler....
The core query softness continues without mitigation
Edward Zitron has been reading all of google's internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ's antitrust case against google.
Zitron concludes that Google Search died on February 5th, 2019
Zitron concludes that Google Search died on February 5th, 2019
It’s peculiar, in the sense that words are supposed to mean something
The Caesar’s mission creep toward absurdity began long before the tequila and the fava beans. In fact, it has been going on for decades—first slowly, then quickly, swept along by and reflective of many of the biggest shifts in American dining. from Something Weird Is Happening With Caesar Salads [The Atlantic; ungated]
Ukraine war heading into third summer
As Congress has finally passed the Ukraine aid bill, hope is returning to the frontline, where Ukrainian troops are increasingly struggling to hold out against a numerically superior Russian force that also has a lot more ammunition to spend. This post has some status updates and commentary on the war at present.
In the future these will be funny stories
It’s 2008. Though a San Francisco resident, I crave “Girl in New York” stories. Felicity Porter, Lena Dunham, Eileen Myles—in books and TV shows, I’ve watched them come of age in their frothy version of Brooklyn. As a black man, I have to tell myself this fascination isn’t me idolizing whiteness. No, this must be, like Venus Xtravanganza before me, a rational envy for those society deems valuable. A desire to chase my dreams through a maze of hangovers and strange lovers and suffer mere embarrassment for my mistakes. It seems I’ve found another such fantasy in this Reagan-era relic about itinerant artists—provided I steal it. Bohemian behavior for a bohemian book. So, Slaves in hand, I keep walking. from The Time I Stole Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York and Couldn’t Stop Reading It by Elwin Cotman
See also Arkell v. Pressdram
The maker of a "Fuck the LAPD" t-shirt received a takedown notice from the Los Angeles Police Foundation on the grounds that the shirt infringed its trademark on "LAPD". Their lawyer's response was nothing if not concise.
I feel that you should be aware some asshole is signing your name to stupid letters.
In 1974, a Cleveland Browns season ticket holder was frustrated with a new fad of throwing paper airplanes in the stadium, and wrote to the Browns to let them know. The Brown's response likely failed to alleviate his concerns.
☆彡 ☆彡 ☆彡 ☆彡 It was like fireworks. ☆彡 ☆彡 ☆彡
It is the late 1800s. You are an innovative fireworks manufacturer in Yokohama, Japan, with an increasingly international audience (including, on at least one occasion, Ulysses S. Grant). But how to demonstrate to your worldwide customers what, exactly, you have on offer? Introducing the beautifully minimalist Hirayama Fireworks' Illustrated Catalog of Night Bomb Shells.
No Tech for Apartheid organizers fired
In an internal memo Wednesday, Google announced the firing of 28 employees in connection to a protest of Project Nimbus. The previous day inside Google offices in New York and California, a couple dozen employees staged a sit-in to bring awareness to the $1.2 billion Israeli government contract. It began in 2021 and provides cloud computing services to Israel—specifically, we’ve recently learned, to the Israeli Ministry of Defense—and though it has faced internal criticism since its inception, efforts against it have naturally intensified since October 7th.
The memo from Google’s global head of security Chris Rackow was ominous. “If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies,” he wrote to the company’s thousands of employees, “think again.” From Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket.
The ultimate con
His real name appears to have been John McCarthy.
And he was the con man who sold the Brooklyn Bridge. By Dean Jobb. (Previously on selling landmarks)
"so many tech demos end up hiding an ugly truth deep down"
Amazon Go, "a new kind of corner store," that company's futuristic storefront where you installed an app on your phone, and could shop for things just by picking them up off of shelves and walking out the door with them, is being shut down. Some random internet person called "Matt Haughey" described his experience with the store, and how it wasn't nearly as magical as it seemed: as it turned out it was a kind of technological sleight-of-hand, instead of using RFIDs and weight-sensing shelves and other techno-devices, they just had a whole lot of people watching cameras. Another random person on Mastodon points out the whole-lot-of-people part was probably a bunch of subsistence contractors in other countries. A third random person notes, even doing that, the store concept couldn't be made to work. Meanwhile the important gigantic hovering electronic head of Jeff Bezos floats above us all, unmoving but watching, silently.
Lemming Soufflé düh Shenanigan
Greig Johnson (previously) offers a beginner's guide to playing the ancient, elegant instrument known as the shenanigan. More of his work can be found on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
Here I am
The Etak Navigator
"Today, I’d like to tell you about the Etak Navigator, a truly revolutionary product and the world’s first practical vehicle navigation system."[via]
RIP Rico Wade, 1972 - 2024
Rico Wade of the Organized Noize production team has died.
Operating from Wade's mom's dirt-floor basement in the early 90s, Organized Noize convened a group of artists that came to call itself the Dungeon Family. That group gave the world the first couple Outkast albums, the first Goodie Mob album, and several great singles. It's not an exaggeration to say that Rico Wade made some of the greatest American music of the last 50 years. It's an incredibly sad loss.
Apparently, Meta deems climate change too controversial for discussion
How Meta Nuked A Climate Story, And What It Means For Democracy, David Vetter, Forbes, April 11 2024
We Lived Alone: The Connie Converse Documentary
A documentary (40m youtube video) from 2014 covers some of the life of the enigmatic singer/songwriter Connie Converse. Interviews with some of her closest relatives, and animator Gene Deitch, all of whom kept many of her letters and recordings.
previously: 2016, 2009
(cw: depression, probable suicide)
Selbstbestimmungsgesetz
Landmark Vote for Trans Rights Law (Human Rights Watch) – "Germany’s parliament on April 12, 2024, passed a landmark law that allows transgender and non-binary people to modify their legal documents to reflect their gender identity through an administrative procedure based on self-identification …"
Six months and counting
Gaza in a Million Pieces
- Arwa Damon, founder and president of the charity INARA, writes for New Lines Magazine of her observations now that she's able to enter Gaza || Le Monde: Despite promises, Israel still restricts aid to Gaza (ungated) || Washington Post: Crutches and chocolate croissants: Gaza aid items Israel has rejected (ungated) || New Yorker (Isaac Chotiner interview with Yuval Abraham): Inside Israel’s Bombing Campaign in Gaza || Haaretz: Israel Has Declared Record Amount of West Bank Land as State-owned in 2024 || Mondoweiss: ‘Come out, you animals’: how the massacre at al-Shifa Hospital happened || Sydney Morning Herald (12 April): Australian former reporter, now aid worker, shot at in Gaza
When quaint becomes cult
Jared Shurin on Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, a "heart-warming/breaking portrayal of lost-and-found geeks captured the zeitgeist of a new [tech] subculture," from casual coding to its Silicon Valley extremes:
Looking back. . . we can see the first seeds of a spin-off culture, one that is not only aware of its incompatibility with the rest of society, but also revels in it. . . thirty years on, it now feels a lot less quaint, and a lot more frightening.
ZachsMind: "It's awesomely awesome!"
Culled from a cancelled FMV 3DO game from 1996, you may never have seen anything so incrediculous as the 7 1/2 minute trailer Duelin' Firemen. While the trailer has been bouncing around the internet for 16 years (previously from 2007 by hypocritical ross), a higher resolution version has turned up that's almost watchable. It contains Rudy Ray Moore, the Rev. Ivan Stang, Mark Mothersbaugh, Dr. Timothy Leary and Tony Hawk. The Youtube channel of a documentary about the game's making has some other obscure clips from it.
"If that offends them, so be it."
"Our Trump reporting upsets some readers, but there aren’t two sides to facts" A letter from The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH) editor Chris Quinn
A computer that could expand with the addition of modular components
The Apple Jonathan
: A Very 1980’s Concept Computer That Never Shipped