~metafilter | Bookmarks (1000)

Bop Spotter "This is culture surveillance. No one notices, no one consents. But it's not about catching criminals. It's about catching vibes. A constant feed of what's popping off in real-time."

When last we visited Ottawa County, Michigan, it was embroiled in a number of lawsuits and controversies ranging from de-funding the local library, to firing of county employees, to various lawsuits. Since then a hotly contested primary in which Ottawa Impact has definitively lost their majority on the council, and other news.April: Satanic Prayer opens Council meeting following lawsuit. June: Dueling endorsements by various...

Two speculative stories about the "nothing about us without us" nuances of international disaster relief and economic development work. From November 2023, by Cory Doctorow: "The Canadian Miracle". Reactor's summary: "A contentious election and radicalized locals interfere with Canadian recovery workers' efforts at the site of a catastrophic flood in near-future Mississippi." (Audio: Part 1, 2.) And: July 2024, by Auke Pols, a researcher...

Vangelis And The Journey To Ithaca is a 2h10m journey from 2013 through the various musical landscapes created by Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou across his career. Whether you know him a little or a lot, you'll probably find something new to you here.

Monday. Stress. Masonry magazine. Free thread. Masonry magazine has an article titled "Unusual Ways to Relieve Stress" and sadly, none of those stress relievers involve the art and craft of building and fabricating in stone, clay, brick, or concrete block. It's your semi-regularly-scheduled free thread! What are your unusual stress relievers? If you don't have any, what are you up to on this (for...

Their debate began almost by accident. The meeting in April had been convened to bring together physicists and philosophers to discuss relativity theory, but Bergson came intending only to listen. When the discussion flagged, however, he was pressed to intervene. Reluctantly, he rose and presented a few ideas from his forthcoming book, Duration and Simultaneity [archive] (1922). What Bergson said in the following half...

Watch Squeak go from being so tiny she can't eat a peanut, to being able to eat one peanut at a time, to chomping through sweet potato slices like a champ.Squeak's young mom is Spike, who had her quite late in the season and is, um, an imperfect parent. Squeak is feisty, pushy, and one of many wild neighbors. I have been enjoying watching...

How the UK became the first G7 nation to phase out coal generation. When the UK privatised its electricity sector in 1990, around 65% of its generation came from coal. From tomorrow, that figure is 0%. Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal power station was commissioned 60 years ago and today generates its last kWh. It is the last of a chain of coal burning generators that have...

We also regard time as a kind of commodity, as if it's fungible, as if 10 blocks of 10 minutes is the same as one chunk of 100 minutes. In human terms, this is absolutely not true. "The mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day." That's Charles Dickens. In other words, if you try and break up your day into...

LGBTQ+ media historian/analyst Matt Baume's newest video is How Rickie from My So-Called Life Changed TV Forever [1h]. It made me cry.It's difficult to describe how much this television show meant to me. And I was older than any of the main characters, but it was speaking to me very deeply. Rickie was just one aspect of this show which seemed to sum up...

Why running emus keep one foot on the ground. Emus might look ungainly when they pick up pace, but they're actually very efficient runners, a new study suggests.

Genetic tracing of market wildlife and viruses at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic Crits-Christoph et al in Cell. Highlights: Common ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 linked to Huanan market matches the global common ancestor • Wildlife mitochondrial DNA identified in samples from stalls positive for SARS-CoV-2 • DNA from raccoon dogs, civets, and other wildlife species detected in market samples • Genotypes of potential hosts...

Kris Kristofferson, legendary songwriter, actor, and poet died today at age 88. Born in 1936 in Brownsville, Texas, Kris led a fascinating life. What I have always liked most about him, however, was how good he seemed to be.Kris started writing at Pomona college in the mid 1950s, was Phi Beta Kappa and graduated summa cum laude in literature. After Pomona, he was a...

Given these strategic roles, any threat to Klaipėda, whether from mismanagement of a dangerous cargo or a deliberate act, has far-reaching implications for regional security and energy stability. The Ruby episode underscores how hybrid threats can potentially evolve to include kinetic elements. The complexity of attribution, combined with Klaipėda's strategic significance, makes it a potential flashpoint for regional security. from Floating Megabomb Heaves to...

Lulu Garcia-Nevarro of The New York Times podcast "The Interview" sits down with HBO host John Oliver for about 40 minutes for one of the most honest interviews I've seen from him: John Oliver Is Still Working Through the Rage. There's a depth to this conversation that you might not be expecting. I found it informative and illuminating; perhaps you will too.Be sure to...

This 12-minute short is a taste of the full 80-minute documentary that will premiere in the summer of 2025, just in time for the 50th anniversary of Space: 1999.Jeffrey Morris' YouTube channel has more videos on this project. The most comprehensive is the panel with Morris and Space: 1999 actor Nick Tate from WonderFest 2024 in Kentucky (which starts with the same short as...

Last summer, the 30th anniversary of Guyville was attended by retrospectives, special reissues, and a celebratory tour. This month, Whip-Smart's anniversary came and went without fanfare. But it's a remarkable album full of expertly crafted songs, and I'd argue that its story is as important, when considering the alternative rock explosion of the 1990s, as that of its more-lauded predecessor. I spoke to Phair,...

Eight years ago, I posted about a new supernatural webcomic called The Strange Cases of Oscar Zahn. The name changed slightly, but the comic continued to 2019. Oscar is the world's greatest paranormal researcher, and an inventor of devices that can detect and affect the spirit world. Oscar is also a talking skull floating above a body. All of them can still be read...

This is precisely the situation in the digital culture right now. Google's success in leeching off newspapers puts newspapers out of business. Musicians earn less and less, even as Spotify makes more and more. Hollywood is collapsing because it can't compete with free video made by content providers. It's no coincidence that these parasite platforms are the same companies investing heavily in AI. They...

The Top Score podcast from Emily Reese is interviews with videogame composers that ran from 2011 to 2015. It was followed in 2015 with a new series, Level With Emily Reese, that is still recording episodes this year. If you enjoy hearing people who create music talk about how and why they've created that music, these are podcasts for you. Even if you aren't...

Øyvind Thorsby, that creator of gloriously weird and weirdly glorious comics full of strange species, decidedly specific spells and gizmos, and lots and lots of farce (previously, previouslier), has begun his seventh comic, My Other Brain is an Idiot (front page currently shows the first of ten pages so far; navigate with the arrow icons). His sixth comic and an updated link to another...

Invasive weed dubbed thorny horror eradicated from Queensland after 15-year battle. The karroo thorn can overrun landscapes and make farmland unproductive, so farmers and biosecurity officers are rejoicing at this eradication achievement.

Scone geography (languagelog). Include the geographically distribution of cream first or jam first scone eaters. For North Americans, how do you pronounce pecan (mefi's own languagehat)? Bonus post on regional pronunciation: Lima, Ohio and Cairo, Ohio.