~metafilter | Bookmarks (954)

Caltrops: 33 minute video exploring the weapon from Ancient Rome to modern Ukraine.Javelin and warbow experts teach each other how to use their weapons (34m). How would a katana master fight with a longsword (7m)? Was the seax even Saxon (8m)? Did Normans wear chainmail onesies (20m)? Were knights muscle-bound or skinny (11m)? Should you defend your tower with a crossbow or longbow (11m)?...

The Carol Reed series (Facebook), the annually-released Swedish indie point-and-click adventure game series (similar to the formerly annual but still going Nancy Drew game series), has just released its TWENTIETH installment, Murder Malady. If you don't want to buy/play any of them, YouTuber Arglefumph has done Let's Plays of the first eighteen (Ctrl+F 'Carol' in the playlists), and here's someone else's commentary-free playthrough of...

Sea sponges under WA tourist attraction could hold cancer-fighting compounds. Scientists from the University of Western Australia are investigating the anti-cancer properties of sea sponges found under Busselton Jetty in Western Australia.

Against Access, an essay by DeafBlind author John Lee Clark about the Protactile movement and the pitfalls of focusing on accessibility: "Companies, schools, nonprofits, and state and federal agencies approach me and other DeafBlind people all the time, demanding, "How do we make it more accessible?" Such a frenzy around access is suffocating. I want to tell them, Listen, I don't care about your...

With Bible sales up 22% over last year, let's revisit The New Yorker's 2006 article "The Good Book Business". (Wayback Machine link)Bible publishing in the twenty-first century involves an intersection of faith and consumerism that is typical of contemporary American evangelicalism. Peter Thuesen, a religious historian and the author of In Discordance with the Scriptures, a history of Bible translation controversies in America, sees...

Browser extension Honey promises to find you the best coupon deals for various goods and services online. But does it really? (Spoiler alert: no.) Apparently they've been doing two things surreptitiously: a) substituting affiliate links with their own, so that they get credit for the sale, and b) making sure that the "best" coupon deal for any given product isn't necessarily the actual best...

A new website, GovernorParson.com, purports to publish a goodbye message from Governor Mike Parson, whose term ends next month. This is just one of the satirical websites that former South Park and MADtv writer Toby Morton (wordclown on instagram) has set up and then emailed to Republican supporters.Other projects include: Chaya Raichik/Libs of TikTok Moms for Liberties (and Daily Beast article about the site)...

One executive in the entertainment industry said younger people were less inclined to go out raving until 6am as they are more health conscious and less frivolous with money than previous generations. from Who killed the rave? Late-night dancing falls into global decline [Financial Times; ungated]

On this day over a dozen years ago, we talked about filmmaker Sam Klemke's decades-long record of year-end reviews, a series of "annual personal status updates" reflecting on the past and hoping for the future that eventually became a poignant documentary film. It's just one example of the surprising emotional power of the "time passing" montage, an under-discussed narrative art that has often been...

Torricelli's trumpet is not counterintuitive – There is nothing counterintuitive about an infinite shape with finite volume, contrary to the common propaganda version of the calculus trope known as Torricelli's trumpet. Nor was this result seen as counterintuitive at the time of its discovery in the 17th century, contrary to many commonplace historical narratives...

Martina makes things. A custom binding for The Lord of the Rings. A suit of armor for her dog. A replacement for her missing finger

Laurie Anderson performing lyrics by C. P. Cavafy In November 2023, the Onassis Foundation organized a concert in St. Thomas Church, NYC, celebrating the great Greek poet C. P. Cavafy.The concert was part of a wider celebration of the opening of the Cavafy Archive in Athens. While we mostly hear about the desperate economic situation in Greece, the country is also going through a...

It's a pitch-perfect combination of old-school shooter action, bombastic anime-style storytelling and Saturday Morning cartoon, and it's free to play on itch.io and Newgrounds. (HTML5, Windows and Mac) Help ace fighter JON STARBUCKLE, stationed on the USS ACRES, pilot the GAR-TYPE D to destroy GORESTAR, a planet-eating threat, with your choice of three different weapons: Ravioli, Macaroni or Spaghetti. If the action is a...

Outrageous Predictions 2025 [Saxo Bank; previously]PS Commentators' Predictions for 2025 [Project Syndicate] 12 Predictions for Life in 2025 [NY Times] End Times: Legendary oracle Baba Vanga's scary predictions for 2025 [Euronews] 10 AI Predictions For 2025 [Forbes] The Ultimate 2025 Horoscope Prediction Guide, According to a Celebrity Astrologer [People] 15 predictions for 2025 [Platformer] The World Ahead 2025 [The Economist]

WA-first artificial reef trial could help tackle coastal erosion nationwide. As communities across Australia battle coastal erosion, one council in WA is seeing promising results from a state-first artificial reef trial that is also helping marine life flourish.

Kevin Foley rakes the red-hot, wooden embers from the iron, cobblestone-shaped ingots; sweat drips from his face as rearranges the ingots into a rectangle. He pours rockweed out of three burlap sacks over the ingots; smoke and steam surround Foley and his two assistants as they rapidly assemble the clambake amid a cacophony of crackles and pops from the bursting seaweed pods.While that was...

The We Rate Dogs Top Ten Dogs of the Year The last 5 are the hero dogs

Jimmy Carter, 1924-2024'Jimmy Carter, a no-frills and steel-willed Southern governor who was elected president in 1976, was rejected by disillusioned voters after a single term and went on to an extraordinary post-presidential life that included winning the Nobel Peace Prize, died Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia, according to his son James E. Carter III, known as Chip. He was 100 and the...

To me, blondeness has always felt like both a special power and a strange curse, a fountain of youth and beauty from which I once happily drank in greedy gulps, but which now runs drier each year. In pictures from my early childhood, I sit shrouded by a mess of golden threads wrangled into a butterfly clip or a hair elastic, beaming with my...

3Blue1Brown (previously) has released a new video: "This open problem taught me what topology is".This is an updated "2nd edition" for the 2016 video "Who cares about topology?"

Our right to change the built environment begins in part with the right to change the building code, to understand it not as something written in stone and handed down from above but instead as a living document worthy of debate, antagonism, and revision. It is only a tiny cog in the complex machines that govern how we live together, but it is also...