~metafilter | Bookmarks (1003)

A quarter of a century after its final season, Homicide: Life on the Streets will finally be available on streaming (via Peacock). Article includes an interview with showrunner Tom Fontana about his memories of filming the show, the hassles with music rights, and speculation about a reboot (please god, no).

OlympicsFilter: Better medal Rankings - Not by total, not by per capita.... "The Duncan-Parece model ranks countries according to how improbable their medal counts are if one assumes that all medal-winning nations have an equal propensity per capita for winning medals. Its measure of improbability is based on the so-called binomial distribution formula, which is the one you would use to calculate the likelihood...

An imaginary island located at a real place. When a place doesn't exist, the first thing to do is to assign it a reasonable size.

Designers and artists are pushing the boundaries with some boardgames. Some wargames have beautiful boards. Some designs are beautiful and joyful. People make lists on Reddit and on BoardGameGeek. Some people design elegant boardgames.

As occasionally happens, a particular novel, read at a particular time, has a profound and instantaneous effect. The Mezzanine made me laugh out loud, and propelled me forward, but it also had that mysterious quality that can't be anticipated or feigned: it made me want to imitate it. Its cerebral, labyrinthine sentences, which were simultaneously jubilant and precise, often making unexpected connections between things...

How Alzheimer's undid my dazzling, creative wife in her 40s. We met on the dancefloor of a nightclub in 2004. I was 32, she was about to turn 35. Far too old for a place like that, but we were reliving former glories in honour of mutual friends – a last glance back at our careless youth. When the management turned us out after...

Clip: In four years, you won't have to vote again. Some more detail -- but no holding accountable -- is in this Washington Post article.

"Thomas Sperry of Cranford NJ and Shelley Byron Hutchinson of Ypsilanti MI, founded the Sperry and Hutchison Co. in 1896. They made money by selling the stamps to retailers who would then give them to their customers. 10 stamps for every dollar spent. Consumers would save up their stamps and then exchange them for products from the S&H Catalog (IdeaBook) at S&H redemption centers,...

Wild dog or dingo? Ancient DNA study suggests there's not much dog at all. DNA analysis suggests dingoes breed with other dogs less than previously thought and reveals key populations pre-date European colonisation.

I [Nick Myles] became addicted to Sinéad O'Connor at an early age, and it's been a long-lasting dependency that I've never had any desire to escape from. I couldn't let the first anniversary of her passing go uncommemorated. 3700 words on Sinéad O'Connor for wearecult.rocks.

"To be sure, the worry is not that the AMOC is on the verge of a complete stop. The fear is that it will cross a pivotal threshold, and then begin a decline that is unstoppable. ... It follows, then, that you'd wonder how close we humans are to that threshold. Perhaps you'd heard about the AMOC's frailty; the shutdown threat; maybe even the...

As the 2024 Paris Olympics opens (with sabotage by unknown actors), it's time to look back at one of the biggest marketing missteps of the Olympics - the McDonald's "When the US Wins, You Win" campaign of the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics.The premise was simple: Get a card with an event on it If the US won a medal - you get a...

The Tour Divide is an unsupported race of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, a 2,745 mile/4,418 km route with over 200,000 feet/61,000 metres of climbing stretching from Banff, Alberta to Antelope Wells, New Mexico. This year 15 year-old Edyn Teitge became the youngest finisher ever completing it in 19 days, 13 hours, and 14 minutes.This isn't a race like the Tour de France...

Like many other filetypes (Office, OpenDocument, EPUB, JAR), WinAmp skins (WSZ) are secretly just ZIP files with specific contents and their own file extension. Jordan Eldredge, the creator and maintainer of the WinAmp Skin Museum (previously, again), investigated a variety of corrupt skins, and from there found a wide variety of interesting stuff, including text and audio files, images, a simple game, and other...

Senators Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Representatives Hank Johnson (GA-04), Jerry Nadler (NY-12), Cori Bush (MO-01), and Adam Schiff (CA-30) have cosponsored The Judiciary Act, not just calling for Supreme Court reform, but introducing (again and again, since 2021 if I'm reading this correctly) actual legislation to make it happen."The Judiciary Act would expand the United States...

In an interview with noted right wing figure and transphobe Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk attacked his estranged transgender daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson, proceeding to deadname her while calling her "dead" because she transitioned, and saying he was "tricked" into signing off on her gender affirming care. In response, Wilson has given an interview with NBC News in which she details how Musk was both...

In Japan, Turning the Tables on Rude Customers NYT: in Japan, there's a word, "kasuhara" that translates into "customer harassment." Customers harassing workers have gotten so extreme that now businesses are fighting back instead of kissing customer booty."Some employers have removed surnames from name tags to protect employees from doxxing on social media. SoftBank, the technology giant, is developing an "emotion canceling" voice alteration...

This short gen fic from a cat's point of view amused me: If Comfy, Warm, and My Size, Why No Sit: A Meta-analysis of Research into the Warm Flat Rectangle by Dr Fluffy Jones

Marsh Family Songs: "Didn't like the way this J.D. Vance bloke (newly picked as Trump's running mate) slagged off the UK lately. Looked into him. Not great. Made a parody song inspired by ABBA called "Vance VP""