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Poet and activist Benjamin Zephaniah dies age 65
One of the important voices of modern Britain, Benjamin Zephaniah was not much like other poets teenagers get introduced to.
Washington Post goes on strike Thursday
On Thursday, the Washington Post's workers are going on strike for 24 hours. They've worked now for 18 months without a satisfactory contract, there have already been layoffs, 240 staff have been offered buyouts, and the owners are now threatening more layoffs. The staff have asked people not to engage with Washington Post content on December 7 from midnight to midnight (a full day). They also encourage you to send a letter to the Post's leaders asking them to stop the cuts and give a fair deal to employees.
Plagiarism and You(Tube)
HBomberguy's latest video is about plagiarism.
It's almost 4 hours long but really worth a watch.
What was it like to build the Millennium Falcon?
"Voice of a Star Wars Fan"
is a fan video perhaps like no other. Better to know as little about it as possible before watching, but if you love old school model making, ILM, and the original Star Wars films, this SLYT video will surely be worthy of your time.
Warm, but nuanced
Imagine a future that doesn't have to resort to the sledgehammer of social compulsion - no mandates and worse, and no risk of poorly designed and implemented mandates that arguably make things worse - because the infrastructure of public health is woven into the fabric of civilization. These worlds are possible, and a medium amount of funding into bio-defense could make it happen. The work would happen even more smoothly if developments are open source, free to users and protected as public goods. from My techno-optimism by Vitalik Buterin
Shane MacGowan: remember him THIS way.
Here he is at his peak,
both as a songwriter and a performer. Here's another side to his songwriting. And here's today's Guardian obituary by Alex Petridis, which gets it about right.
Self selective assortative voting (with your feet)
The Red State Brain Drain Isn't Coming. It's Happening Right Now. [archive] - "As conservative states wage total culture war, college-educated workers—physicians, teachers, professors, and more—are packing their bags."
Sex! Gender! Queerness!
Meg-John Barker has moved on from being an academic psychologist and practicing psychotherapist after publishing books and papers on bisexuality, consensual non-monogamy, sadomasochism, non-binary gender, and Buddhist mindfulness. Now they make graphic guides and zines to reach a much wider audience. Wondering what a queer relationship looks like? Or how you actually talk about consent in a relationship? Or maybe how to stay grounded when you are full of scary feelings? They also just published an anti-self-help guide to love, sex and relationships called Rewriting the Rules.
Effective obfuscation
Web 3 is Going Just Great creator Molly White writes in her Citation Needed newsletter on effective altruism and effective accelerationism: As Sam Bankman-Fried rose and fell, people outside of Silicon Valley began to hear about “effective altruism” (EA) for the first time. Then rifts emerged within OpenAI with the ouster and then reinstatement of CEO Sam Altman, and the newer phrase “effective accelerationism” (often abbreviated to “e/acc” on Twitter) began to enter the mainstream. Both ideologies ostensibly center on improving the fate of humanity, offering anyone who adopts the label an easy way to brand themselves as a deep-thinking do-gooder.
When Your Ad Budget Supports Hate
As part of their investigative journalism on the social media platform once known as Twitter, Media Matters For America reported that ads were being served by the platform next to hateful, bigoted, antisemitic, and white supremacist content on the platform, resulting in advertisers such as IBM pulling their ads from the platform. Which led to the service filing a defamation lawsuit against MMFA over their reporting.
A daily visit to Hotel Fred
Roger Langridge
is a cartoonist. Every morning, he draws a four panel strip about whatever happens to be on his mind and posts it online. Some are about the everyday trials and delights of family life, some are about his dog and others simply rif on what the medium can do. I like them a lot.
PJ Harvey at the Tiny Desk
This is where Harvey lives as a fully realized artist: on her own artistic plane, inviting listeners to take their time to fully join her.
Harvey keeps her gestures minimal as she sets her scenes and speaks through them. Matching her voice to those of her trusted collaborators John Parish and James Johnston as they invoke the forest's ghosts — the "chalky children of evermore" — she lets the fecund imagery of her lyrics resonate.
Beautiful Dying Wish
Woman who died of Ovarian Cancer's last wish: wipe out medical debt...
Previously on MetaFilter: Toledo wipes out medical debt, Predatory Givers
happy birthday mr freeman
25 years ago, on November 19th 1998, a small game studio called Valve Corporation launched their debut game: a zombie shooter and puzzle platformer called Half-Life.
Yesterday, Valve published their 25 year anniversary update to the game (complete with restored multiplayer maps, bug fixes, patch notes and a usable crowbar), leading to a new all time high of 14 thousand concurrent players (xitter link).
Late Wednesday Night Inspirational Speech Post
"no matter how hard you try to implement these discriminatory policies in the right way, you are never going to find a right way to do the wrong thing" Man gives truly inspiring speech at Virginia Beach school board meeting [DailyKos, includes transcript] "And Gov. Youngkin’s policies are wrong.
One of the ways you could tell is because you have speakers from groups like Moms for Liberty here to support them. And I'll be real simple in case you aren’t paying attention—they're not the good guys. How can you tell? I can help. The good guys don't get declared extremist groups by human rights organizations." Direct Link To Video Of Speech [2m10s]
Some interesting ideas about land use, taxation and speculators.
Detroit is the prime example but land speculation has been a blight for a very long time.
SLNYT gift link - Detroit is now under 700 thousand people but it was built to handle 2 million so it really sprawls. It's a huge challenge to provide services and several asshole billionaires are sitting on hundreds (nope - many thousands) of empty buildings and vacant land. I don't know that Georgism is the answer but it's certainly interesting.
This is why I love Naomi Kritzer
The Year Without Sunshine is a new story by Naomi Kritzer. It's about what happens after the really big disaster. Kritzer is perhaps best known for Cat Pictures Please, but her other works have been lauded on MetaFilter previously (previously; previously; previously - So Much Cooking; previously - Better Living Through Algorithms, plus her election guide); previously - Paradox; previously; all the previouslies).
I'm bad at Really Bad Chess...
Puzzmo is webgame site
that I came across somewhere on the Internet. I was delighted at the prospect of having to solve a puzzle in order to get access to the site at this time! Turns out I'm really bad at Really Bad Chess but got in anyway.
Jury finds Sam Bankman-Fried guilty
Jury finds Sam Bankman-Fried guilty.
Not a big surprise for anybody who has been casually following the whole crypto "industry" or trial. For newcomers, FTX is (was?) a cryptocurrency exchange well known for their explosive growth and valuation and Sam Bankman-Fried (commonly abbreviated as SBF) was hailed as the genius CEO. A lot of people wondered how they managed it, and unsurprisingly, it turns out the magic ingredient was fraud.
Some previous hits involving FTX include SBF describing their business model as essentially a ponzi scheme and being hailed as a visionary by Sequoia Capital for hit pitch while playing League of Legends. His inability to shut up and dig himself into a deeper hole can't have helped.
The little guys show up in medieval marginalia hunting mice & being cute
First of all, I would like to ask which “religious leaders” this cat account thinks condemned cats in the fourteenth century.
You would see some kind of documentation, because a mass cull of cats would represent a huge 180 from standard medieval practice surrounding the animals, because medieval people fucking loved cats.
A quarter of a century later, the show continues
Dropped on the world as a kind of polished, keenly self-aware zine at the dawn of what would become the era of digital publishing, McSweeney’s was, in other words, a Statement, an anti-magazine created by rogue magazine professionals. Eggers had already cofounded Might, a short-lived San Francisco magazine with a cult following, but McSweeney’s was simultaneously more ambitious and stripped down. “This thing will be more about trying new, and almost certainly misguided, ideas,” he wrote in an email to would-be contributors in 1998. “It’ll be fun, and if we’re not careful, we might make publishing history!” Eggers expected it to run for four issues, eight at the most, but he was so wrong. from Dave Eggers’s Pirate Ship
color coded areas by cat: yellow (Scribbles); red (Coriander)...
How do cats use space? Part 3: Looking at relationships (with Dr. Delgado's cats). Part 2: Multiple & separated key resources. Part 1: In the original study "the density of cats was much higher than that observed in studies of outdoor cats (113,000 cats/km2)." Dr. Mikel Maria Delgado has also shared research on can kittens do math and the Feline Grimace Scale, a tool that can quickly identify pain in most cats.
Goodbye Bobby Lee
Six years ago, white supremacists marched (ostensibly) to defend a statue of Robert E Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia. Today, two Washington Post reporters documented the process of cutting that statue up and melting the pieces down into ingots. (gift link)
The History Behind London's Green Cabmen's Shelters
The History Behind London's Green Cabmen's Shelters. As you walk around London you may come across one of these green huts by the side of the road.
They are Cabmen’s shelters and they are amazing relics of Victorian London, but also a fantastic example of living history, as many of them are still in use today.
Heck with it, we'll just go build our own electric truck.
Please enjoy Edison Motor's first demonstration of their electric semi running under load, silently hauling over 100,000 pounds of weird Sherman-Tank/Chevy thing, and 45 minutes explaining the design and engineering decisions around it.
Hats are cakes, and handbags are toasters
"A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways. The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission." (Melissa Heikkilä, MIT Technology Review)
The fight to save Sheffield's street trees
It all started with a perfectly reasonable proposition. Sheffield’s roads were in a bad state, and its pavements were wonky.
In order to fix this, with no money available due to Tory government cuts, Sheffield City Council (Labour run through the duration of this saga) decided the solution was to cut down the trees whose roots appeared to be pushing up the asphalt and causing this damage. They seemed not to take into account that residents loved their tree lined streets. Years of protest and conflict ensued as the council didn't back down.
Froderick
Froderick gets a home.
(SLYT)
this is (not) a drill
EAS Scenarios, or Mock EAS, is a type of analog horror that uses emergency alert systems (generally televised) to tell a story about a fictional horrific event. Some examples include: SCP Realised (mock EASes based on the SCP Foundation); The Final Minutes' Zombie Plague, 2050 (futuristic international EASes), and The Tiangong Incident; V-DAY, the radio-based Absolute Zero, and a 1990s UK Black Hole broadcast. Also: don't look at the moon.
cooperation and resilience vital to survive climate collapse conditions
The new research, published in a peer-reviewed biological sciences journal from The Royal Society last month, suggests that resilience is an ability that societies can gain and lose over time. Researchers found that a stable society can withstand even a dramatic climate shock, whereas a small shock can lead to chaos in a vulnerable one.
Apple takes a bite out of speech
Jon Stewart's Apple TV show ends over editorial dispute regarding coverage of AI and China.
Apple previously garnered public attention by removing an app in order to support the crackdown on Hong Kong protests in 2019. They bolstered this position with a curtailing a file sharing tool used to evade Chinese censorship in 2022.
"Two years ago, I thought RICO was a relative of his."
Sidney Powell Pleads Guilty in Georgia Trump Case
(NYT gift, WaPo gift, The Atlantic gift, AP, Reuters)
Scholastic's "bigot button"
'[T]his year, facing pressure from right-wing ideologues, Scholastic is facilitating the exclusion of books that feature people of color and/or LGBTQ characters. Scholastic has grouped many of these titles in a collection called "Share Every Story, Celebrate Every Voice." School officials are then given the option to exclude the entire set of books from the book fair. Scholastic has, in the words of one librarian, given schools a "bigot button" to exclude these books and mollify intolerant pressure groups.'
“Class C” felony endangerment
An Alabama woman was imprisoned for ‘endangering’ her fetus. She gave birth in a jail shower. (SLGuardian) During nearly 12 hours of labor, staff gave her only Tylenol for her pain, the suit says, allegedly telling her to “stop screaming”, to “deal with the pain” and that she was “not in full labor”. Caswell lost amniotic fluid and blood and was alone and standing up in a jail shower when she ultimately delivered her child, according to the complaint and her medical records. She nearly bled to death, her lawyers say.
“When I think of colleges, the word courage doesn’t come to mind”
Why Won’t Elite Colleges Deploy the One Race-Neutral Way to Achieve Diversity? Giving a leg up to poor students of all races would diversify elite schools. Officials would rather do anything else.
Bwah ha ha ha ha
Keith Giffen, legendary comics writer/artist (Ambush Bug, Justice League International, Legion of Super-Heroes, Trencher, the Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle, and much, much more) has passed away at 70, and left a final Facebook post for the ages.
He will be fondly remembered and sorely missed.
The Transgender Family Handbook
There is plenty of rhetoric out there that might encourage a parent to question their child in this moment that’s designed to scare them into inaction or, worse, outright rejection. There is less guidance for those who choose to believe their children. This is a handbook for the trans-affirming family; it presumes you love your child and want what’s best for them. And while it’s their journey alone, you have the opportunity, and obligation, to help them to become who they are.
Vaccines Fuck Yeah
In major news in the fight against malaria, the World Health Organization has approved the R21 vaccine - which can be produced cheaply at scale.
Arguably the funniest McCarthyist purge in US political history
Representative Patrick McHenry (R-NC) has become acting Speaker of the House after Kevin McCarthy, rocked by a series of failed budget votes (and a last-minute agreement with Democrats to avoid a government shutdown), was ousted by Matt Gaetz and other far-right members of the House Freedom Caucus in an unprecedented vote. McCarthy, while likely to run for the speakership again, is no shoo-in given the 15 ballots it took him to secure the gavel just nine months ago (previously).
Interview with Menewood audiobook narrator, Pearl Hewitt
A far-ranging interview between author Nicola Griffith and audiobook narrator Pearl Hewitt on the craft.
A warm and thoughtful discussion ranging from the technical details of voice exercises and DIY recording to homesickness and place names and building careers. Hewitt narrated award-winning Hild, a fantastical history of St Hilda of Whitby, and her upcoming sequel Menewood.
US FTC and states file antitrust suit against Amazon retail operations
The US Federal Trade Commission and more than a dozen state attorneys general have filed a sweeping antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, alleging that the e-commerce giant has unlawfully leveraged its market dominance to stamp out would-be competitors.
Thousands have been tricked this way
It was hard to see how this slave complex could exist without cryptocurrency. Crypto bros like to claim they were somehow helping the poor. But it seemed none of them had bothered to look into the darker consequences of a technology that allowed for anonymous, untraceable payments. From ‘Don’t You Remember Me?’ The Crypto Hell on the Other Side of a Spam Text [Bloomberg; ungated]
Comics. Often dirty. Indexed.
A search index for the very-NSFW web comic Oglaf. On Mastodon, Esther talks about how she built it. [previousliest]