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English as she was Spoke
In 1586, Jacques Bellot published one of the earliest printed phrasebooks for refugees, the Familiar Dialogues: For the Instruction of The[m], That Be Desirous to Learne to Speake English, and Perfectlye to Pronou[n]ce the Same. [...] The book, in 16mo, is laid out in three parallel columns: English, French, and a quasi-phonetic transcription of the sounds of the English text. [...] Bellot says “I have written the English not onely so as the inhibaters of the country do write it: But also, as it is, and must be pronoun[n]ced”. [...] While men had contact with the local community through their work and would have developed enough spoken English to get by, their wives and other family members who were mostly at home had limited opportunities to learn the local language. At this time, there was significant local hostility to foreigners in England, and [...] “a knowledge of everyday English was some protection against mindless scare-mongering” [...] The content of the Familiar Dialogues belies its audience in that it caters to the immediate language needs of refugees and deals with everyday interactions. These include going to school, shopping and eating a meal [...] Indeed , this little book, with its focus on domestic situations rather than travel/touristic situations, anticipates the refugee phrasebooks of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Jacques Bellot’s Familiar Dialogues: An Early Modern Refugee Phrasebook // Read the book on Project Gutenberg // The history of Huguenot refugees in England // Linguist Simon Roper has a neat video exploring (and re-enacting) the book's practical "Street English"
Chicago photography
Neighbors and neighborhoods near Midway Airport.
I loved these photos, seeing them is like biking around in these neighborhoods. It's so easy to take photos now, but ordinary life with good composition and good light is still an unexpected pleasure.
Smoking is Awesome
"The average smoker loses 10 years of life. Which means some lose, like, 5 years and some lose like 25. You don't know which one will be you." Smoking is Awesome by Kurzgesagt and How "Anti-Vaping" Ads Trick You Into Vaping by Maggie Mae Fish are two sides of a coin: Maggie Mae Fish explains the media literacy needed to determine what makes effective anti-smoking ads and how tobacco (and now vaping) companies direct policy towards ineffective anti-smoking ads. Kurzgesagt has an informative and effective anti-smoking video.
Alice Munro, 1931-2024
Alice Munro, master of short stories, wove intense tales of human drama from small-town life
is the Globe and Mail obituary [archive] for the Canadian literary giant who passed away Monday night. She received the Nobel in literature in 2013 among countless other prizes. She also cofounded Munro’s Books in Victoria, British Columbia, who posted a remembrance on Instagram. The New Yorker, where many of her stories first appeared, has a section with links to her short fiction, as well as personal essays, appraisals and an interview and an obituary [archive]. The 1978 classic Moons of Jupiter was recently featured on their fiction podcast, and it is also available as text.
Improve Your Sandwiches
Simple Rules for Better Sandwiches [11m30s] is part of the Technique with Lan Lam series from America's Test Kitchen. From suggestions for contrasting ingredients to techniques like pressing, and other ways to examine the ways that sandwiches could be improved.
The weird and wonderful world of the PC-98
Pastel cities trapped in a timeless future-past. Empty apartments drenched in nostalgia. Classic convertibles speeding into a low-res sunset. Femme fatales and mutated monsters doing battle. Deep, dark dungeons and glittering star ships floating in space. All captured in a eerie palette of 4096 colours and somehow, you’re sure, from some alternate 1980s world you can’t quite remember… Drawn painstakingly one pixel at a time, with a palette of 4096 possible colours, pushing the limits of these 80’s era machines memory, these early graphic artists and hackers alike have left an indelible mark on the world of digital art and internet culture, only to be forgotten in the passing of time. But what made this boring business computer from Japan so special?The strange world of Japan’s PC-98 computer [contains some NSFW pixel art] / More striking imagery: Incredible pictures from an era of games we never got to experience [CW: flashing lights] - Tumblr: High quality [SFW] pixel art from PC-98 games - Pixelation.org: The Art of PC98 - Amino: The world of PC-98 Pixel Art - Galleries from @noirlac, @item, and @densetsu.ch
The Last Pre-Raphaelite
Edward Burne-Jones was the last Pre-Raphaelite. Frank Cadogan Cowper was the last Pre-Raphaelite. Christiana Herringham was so late in the game, she was more of a Pre-Raphaelite Renaissance painter.
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.
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
Celebrate Madonna, Again!
Since this post has been taken down because the video has been taken down, I have since found three versions of Madonna - Live From Copacabana, Río de Janeiro, Brasil (The Celebration Tour 2024) [2h15m], of which this is the most recent. This is essentially a game of whack-a-mole, but it keeps getting reposted. Just search for "Madonna Celebration Rio" to find the newest version. Enjoy!
Fear, Cynicism, Nihilism, and Apathy
Even in a state where surveillance is almost total, the experience of tyranny and injustice can radicalize people. Anger at arbitrary power will always lead someone to start thinking about another system, a better way to run society. [...] If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned. [...] Here is a difficult truth: A part of the American political spectrum is not merely a passive recipient of the combined authoritarian narratives that come from Russia, China, and their ilk, but an active participant in creating and spreading them. Like the leaders of those countries, the American MAGA right also wants Americans to believe that their democracy is degenerate, their elections illegitimate, their civilization dying. The MAGA movement’s leaders also have an interest in pumping nihilism and cynicism into the brains of their fellow citizens, and in convincing them that nothing they see is true. Their goals are so similar that it is hard to distinguish between the online American alt-right and its foreign amplifiers, who have multiplied since the days when this was solely a Russian project. Tucker Carlson has even promoted the fear of a color revolution in America, lifting the phrase directly from Russian propaganda.The New Propaganda War: Autocrats in China, Russia, and elsewhere are now making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world. [SLAtlantic]
Where's the Beef? The Greatest Diss Tracks in Hip Hop
The Ringer- Greatest Diss Tracks of All Time, Ranked
As the Kendrick Lamar/ Drake feud continues (apparently won by Kendrick at this point), the Ringer looks over their listing of great diss tracks in hip-hop. At the Root, Noah McGee provides a different list. Alex Petridis also weighs in on the subject at the Grauniad.
David Bowie Serious Moonlight Tour Full Show
David Bowie Live | 1983 | Sydney | Serious Moonlight Tour | Pro shot | Complete Concert [1h50m] "On the 20th November 1983, David Bowie performed his final Australian concert of the Serious Moonlight tour. This Betamax recording was taken from a sight screen feed made at that time. The first couple of numbers, plus the end have some artefacts but, as it hasn't been viewed in nearly 40 years, the quality overall has held up well. The audio was in mono and has been remastered to bring it out more."
Neom - The Line - The Rise and Fall of Saudi Arabia
a video review by Patrick Boyle
Well, what it says on the tin...
That inequality lies at the heart of what we call “data colonialism”
"The term might be unsettling, but we believe it is appropriate. Pick up any business textbook and you will never see the history of the past thirty years described this way. A title like Thomas Davenport’s Big Data at Work spends more than two hundred pages celebrating the continuous extraction of data from every aspect of the contemporary workplace, without once mentioning the implications for those workers. EdTech platforms and the tech giants like Microsoft that service them talk endlessly about the personalisation of the educational experience, without ever noting the huge informational power that accrues to them in the process." (Today’s colonial “data grab” is deepening global inequalities, LSE)
Let's play life
the internet has produced many things, but its driving force is cowardice. it's there in the collective failure to conceptualize how the things one does online manifest themselves in the larger world. it's there in the lionization of an almost spiritual level of intellectual laziness in the need to endlessly double down on whatever your personal brand becomes. it's there in the desire to tear down anyone who might attempt to shine a light on your own personal failures and limitations, in either your work or your larger perspective on the world. the internet is a refuge for the bad faith. Let's play life, a long post about "let's plays", internet culture and youtube by Liz Ryerson (previously)
Shut Up 'n Play Yer ... Bicycle?
In 1963, a clean-cut Frank Zappa appeared live on the Steve Allen show playing a musical composition on bicycles. The entire 16:28 is worthwhile to watch for the conversation and interaction between the two, but the performance with the show's orchestra starts at 11:56. The show's talent coordinator Jerry Hopkins discusses how the young musician's debut performance came about.
"That Summer" Official trailer
🎥 "That Summer" 🎥 Peter Beard (and his then girlfriend Lee Radziwill) was the impetus for the June 1972 meeting of the Beales and the Maysles - culminating in Grey Gardens the documentary
the impetus for the June 1972 meeting of the Beales and the Maysles - culminating in Grey Gardens the documentary (and later the musical and film).
In 2007, a film lab accidentally returned a rough cut of 1972 Maysles footage of The Beales to Peter using an old label on a film cannister. It was part of the Maysles Films archives digitization project and was supposed to be returned to Maysles directly, but had been paid for by Peter and Lee in 1972 and had Peter's still-current address on it.
The Battle for Attention
Nathan Heller on the secretive Order of the Third Bird:
There is a long-standing, widespread belief that attention carries value. In English, attention is something that we “pay.” In Spanish, it is “lent.” The Swiss literary scholar Yves Citton, whose study of the digital age, “The Ecology of Attention,” argues against reducing attention to economic terms, suggested to me that it was traditionally considered valuable because it was capable of bestowing value. “By paying attention to something as if it’s interesting, you make it interesting. By evaluating it, you valorize it,” he said. To treat it as a mere market currency, he thought, was to undersell what it could do.
A compendium of Signs and Portents
The Book of Miracles unfolds in chronological order divine wonders and horrors, from Noah’s Ark and the Flood at the beginning to the fall of Babylon the Great Harlot at the end; in between this grand narrative of providence lavish pages illustrate meteorological events of the sixteenth century. In 123 folios with 23 inserts, each page fully illuminated, one astonishing, delicious, supersaturated picture follows another. Vivid with cobalt, aquamarine, verdigris, orpiment, and scarlet pigment, they depict numerous phantasmagoria: clouds of warriors and angels, showers of giant locusts, cities toppling in earthquakes, thunder and lightning. Against dense, richly painted backgrounds, the artist or artists’ delicate brushwork touches in fleecy clouds and the fiery streaming tails of comets. There are monstrous births, plagues, fire and brimstone, stars falling from heaven, double suns, multiple rainbows, meteor showers, rains of blood, snow in summer. [...] Its existence was hitherto unknown, and silence wraps its discovery; apart from the attribution to Augsburg, little is certain about the possible workshop, or the patron for whom such a splendid sequence of pictures might have been created.The Augsburg Book of Miracles: a uniquely entrancing and enigmatic work of Renaissance art, available as a 13-minute video essay, a bound art book with hundreds of pages of trilingual commentary, or a snazzy Wikimedia slideshow of high-resolution scans.
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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.
“Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle.”
“I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.”
"It was 2017, and a YIMBY activist invited me to talk about my book Nixonland with his book club, which also happened to be Marc Andreessen’s book club."
The Portugal Model for Addressing the Overdose Crisis
I am a professor of medicine and public health
who researches the government’s response to addiction. I also spent more than two decades as a police officer. If cities expect to help reduce our nation’s overdose crisis and not simply ride a policy pendulum back and forth between election cycles, their leaders need to enact compassionate, effective drug policies and ensure fair access to public space at the same time.
Grace Cummings
So I was out yesterday and listening to the NPR show World Cafe, as I do if/when I'm out at that time, and the host starts going on and on about the voice of the featured artist that day, about how stunning it is, and I'm thinking, come on, don't oversell it. They weren't overselling it.
Phish at The Sphere
How Phish turned Las Vegas’ Sphere into the ultimate music visualizer
"Some moments last night felt like you were seeing enormous versions of the old visualizers from Winamp or iTunes. Others brought the crowd into intricate, dazzling scenes."
Unlikely friendship between cockatoo and lorikeet
Unlikely friendship between cockatoo and lorikeet bamboozles wildlife sanctuary visitors.
A red-tailed black cockatoo and a musk lorikeet have become inseparable, with the smaller bird often found under the wing of the cockatoo at Tasmania's Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary.
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 still wanted to help. But I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”
The Deaths of Effective Altruism
[archive] by Leif Wenar is a critical assessment of the effective altruism movement, taking in Sam Bankman-Fried and billionaires, Peter Singer and other philosophers, and GiveWell and the wider network of charities working off effective altruistic ideas.
Unsettled Tarot
This is an online tarot reading. You page through ten randomly loaded cards, each card combined with randomly loaded text. I drew the cards, they are my personal tarot deck. They iconography has very little to do with a traditional tarot deck, each drawing is something I could not express in words. It's not intended to be mystical, more to trigger unexpected associations.
The Cloud Under The Sea: the ships that repair undersea cables
The world’s emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers, satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are about as thin as a garden hose. There are about 800,000 miles of these skinny tubes crisscrossing the Earth’s oceans, representing nearly 600 different systems, according to the industry tracking organization TeleGeography. The cables are buried near shore, but for the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor, the hair-thin strands of glass at their center glowing with lasers encoding the world’s data.
If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function.
“Anything about us, without us, is against us.”
There are clear continuities between the two German genocides. Many of the key elements of the Nazi system – the systematic extermination of peoples seen as racially inferior, racial laws, the concept of Lebensraum, the transportation of people in cattle trucks for forced labour in concentration camps – had been employed half a century earlier in South-West Africa. Heinrich Göring, the colonial governor of South-West Africa who tried to negotiate with Hendrik Witbooi, was Hermann Göring’s father.–From the essay Three Genocides by forensic architect Eyal Weizman.
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]
The strangest new sport in the Netherlands: tegelwippen, "tile whipping"
The strangest new sport in the Netherlands: tegelwippen, "tile whipping", or "whipping away" the paving stones. "A lot of people think that tiles are easier, but actually when you have larger trees, you get very few weeds underneath them and you can make it really easy," she says. "When I had paving I would never sit here, but now it’s a garden, it’s cooler in summer and in the spring, it’s lovely."
The Backdoor To The Entire Internet That Didn't Happen
A rather large drama unfolded a couple of weeks ago when it was discovered that someone had installed a backdoor into an installation utility used by much of the Open Source community. Backdoor found in widely used Linux utility targets encrypted SSH connections [Ars Technica] This was found by accident, a worker was maintaining his own code and found discrepancies in computer performance and investigated. How one volunteer stopped a backdoor from exposing Linux systems worldwide [The Verge] This seems to have been largely the work of one online account that spent years gaining trust in the group that maintain this tool. THE OTHER PLAYERS WHO HELPED (ALMOST) MAKE THE WORLD’S BIGGEST BACKDOOR HACK [The Intercept] The Mystery of ‘Jia Tan,’ the XZ Backdoor Mastermind [WIRED] Today, Fedora announced its own systems all clear of this thwarted backdoor attempt. CVE-2024-3094: All Clear
crankin' out tunes
In her article Th'infernal Drone: In Praise Of The Hurdy-Gurdy
Jennifer Lucy Allan notes that in "Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights the soundtrack to hell is a giant and infernal hurdy-gurdy". She discusses, among others, Stevie Wishart, who can be seen here giving a quick introduction to the hurdy-gurdy, and performing her composition Vespers for St. Hildegard and duoing with daegeum player Hyelim Kim. Corinna de Fonseca-Wollheim profiled Matthias Loibner in the New York Times [archive link] and his performance with Nataša Mirković of Schubert's Winter's Journey. For an overview of the history of the instrument, hurdy-gurdy player Fredrik Knudsen made a half-hour video or you can read A Brief History of the Hurdy-Gurdy by Graham Whyte.
this world is still mostly undefined
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Uncommonly Lovely Invented Words for What We Feel but Cannot Name
A review by Maria Popova on her blog The Marginalian.
The Oldest Boats Ever Found in the Mediterranean
Five Canoes Discovered Northwest of Rome Are the Oldest Boats Ever Found in the Mediterranean. The 7000-year-old vessels offer evidence of advanced seafaring technology and an extensive regional trade network, a new study suggests.
Wide Awakes in America
Election season, 1860: "Stumping for the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, [a] strange movement electrified the presidential election. Young men from Bangor to San Francisco and from huge Philadelphia clubs to tiny Iowa troupes donned uniforms, lit torches, and “fell in” to pseudomilitary marching companies." The Wide Awakes, as they were known, began as escorts for Republican speakers, but as the campaign season continued, these "political police" became an intimidating presence throughout much of the nation--young, fervent brawlers and unapologetic supporters of an aggressive style of American political combat.
Wagon breaks down
In 1971, three student teachers in Minneapolis, MN created a little computer game about westward expansion in the United States.
Over 50 years later, The Oregon Trail series has sold more than 65 million copies and has been inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. But the original creators never made a penny off the game. This is a lovely, slow-placed documentary about how the game was made and spread, with background information about the state of the computer industry and education in MN at the time.
Rare turtles are making a comeback after a virus almost wiped them out
These rare turtles are making a comeback after a virus almost wiped them out. Nearly 100 captive-bred Bellinger River snapping turtles have been released into the wild, the biggest number yet for the breeding program after a virus nearly wiped them out in 2015.
Scientific American November 1986
A fascinating glimpse of what was going on in the science world 38 years ago in the November 1986 issue of Scientific American and what has changed and what has remained the same: Voyager 2's visit to Uranus cover story and how a fix had to be made from Earth • Affordable housing problems - "The Shadow Market in Housing" • Learn about the Higgs boson long before it was found (RIP Peter Higgs) • Galileo, Bruno and the Inquisition • Computer Recreations - "Star Trek emerges from the underground to a place in the home-computer arcade" • The Amateur Scientist - "... experiments on three-dimensional vision" • All the 1986 ads, including "Texas Instruments brings the practical applications of AI to your business. Now." (p 15)
... will shock you
a webcomic by max graves.
tumblr softboy cancelled for involvement in "heavenly creatures" style murder. darkly hilarious exploration of internet fame, isolation, transness and trauma. goes deep into various kinds of internet damage. really can't recommend this enough.
"You better not throw like that in a mud ball fight kid!"
"The invention of the dunk tank clown shows just how far the line of what is considered appropriate for a society has moved over the decades."
'The Last of the Dunk Tank Clowns.'. (archiveorg) "This attraction is now virtually obsolete. Outdoor Amusement Business Association president Greg Chiecko was quoted as claiming he polled his members about dunk tank clowns and that “most say they don’t know of any that still exist today.” (medium) 'Chicago’s Riverview Park and the Racist Dunk Tank'. {CW: Racism. Clowns.}
Ripley: A Hard Man To Find
A grifter named Ripley (Andrew Scott) living in 1960s New York is hired by a wealthy man to visit Italy and convince his son to come home. (8-episode mini-series, Netflix, 2024)