~metafilter | Bookmarks (1003)

"Every time I sit down to write, I have a great fear that anything I write will reveal me as the monster I was always told I would be. But that fear is personal, something I must face in everything I do, every act I contemplate. Writing is an act that claims courage and meaning, and turns back denial, breaks open fear." Dorothy Allison,...

Strike-friendly games from the NYT tech guild "New York Times tech workers are still on strike after walking out one day before the presidential election. That means they're still asking people to skip their usual Crossword, Wordle, or Connections routines. But now, the union has released its own offerings for games lovers that could keep them from crossing the digital picket line." - Fast...

"Compensate the Losers?" Economic Policy and Partisan Realignment in the US by Ilyana Kuziemko, Nicolas Longuet-Marx, and Suresh Naidu (thread @ dead bird, graph)We argue that the Democratic Party's evolution on economic policy helps explain partisan realignment by education. We show that less-educated Americans differentially demand "predistribution" policies (e.g., a federal jobs guarantee, higher minimum wages, protectionism, and stronger unions), while more-educated Americans differentially...

"It's smart to plan for the future. But the seed vault assumes that we know enough to plan effectively and that people will pay attention to what we know. History shows this is often not the case."See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages. As I mentioned elsewhere, I'm currently reading the SF classic A Canticle for Leibowitz. A significant part of the plot revolves around preservation of parts...

Why shower with your nose when you can use a hose? Zoo elephants adopt garden tech. Elephants in the Berlin Zoo were captured on video using a sophisticated tool — a hose — to take a shower and prank each other.

The Most Insane Weapon You Never Heard About - "At the height of the Cold War, a terrifying concept emerged: a bomb so powerful it wouldn't need to be dropped. Known as Project Sundial, this doomsday device would have left a 400-km radius in flames and plunged the world into darkness. It was a bomb that would destroy everything – not a weapon, but...

In the early 19th century, German naturalist Lorenz Oken quickly established himself as a leader in the Naturphilosophie [wiki] movement, a current of Idealism, which attempted to comprehend a total view of nature by investigating its theoretical structure—a precursor to the natural sciences as we know them today. Oken's seminal work Allgemaine Naturgeschichte Für Alle Stände, or General Natural History For All Classes, was...

Jadie Stillwell & Nicole Blackwood (LitHub, 11/2024), "Among the Sleuths": "the fictional detective became a mythic figure long ago. She's also, fittingly, something of a mystery herself." Related: the song "Nancy Drew" by Tuscadero. r/NancyDrew on most / least favorite, love-hate, & favorite game, and issues with newer games. Gab Smolders (previously) plays Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake and Mystery of the Seven Keys....

Watching Rocky IV in 2024, however, was clarifying to me in the ongoing debate around "21st century cultural stasis." The basic argument is that culture is less healthy because there are fewer significant aesthetic changes. This implies a healthy ecosystem produces a large quantity of relics, as new styles outmode old ones. Songs that are "so Eighties" imply that the Nineties rejected all of...

The 100 Best Film Noirs of All Time ...just what it says on the tin.Before the onslaught of end of the year Best-Of lists, here is a solid top 100 for your palaver pleasure. Big bonus points to Paste Magazine for publishing it on a single web page, rather than over a 25 page ad-filled link schmozzle.

Via the Video Game Weather ASMR YT channel & This Week in Sound: Eight hours with no loops, "driving around the city of Los Santos in a thunderstorm on a lonely night . . . GTAV ASMR. Grand Theft Auto V recorded using an Elgato 4K60 Pro capture card with OBS and edited with Wondershare Filmora 11. Video game weather ambience for ASMR." No...

Housing model that's gold for women fleeing domestic violence. The model turns empty buildings into homes for vulnerable women and a shelter organisation wants it expanded to give more people a safe place to sleep at night amid the housing crisis.

If you're visiting MetaFilter for the first time in a while because whoa, US election, just a friendly reminder that MetaFilter depends on member support in order to keep running. Additionally, MetaFilter is moving to a community-run model, so you might want to check out the latest update about that. But because this is a weblog, a few additional links about communities below the...

Elwood Edwards, the voice behind AOL's You've Got Mail has passed away at 74.His voice is synonymous with the web 1.0. Steve Case, former CEO of AOL, wanted to add a voice to the user experience. He recorded, in 1989, on a cassette player at home, the six phrases used by AOL, "Welcome", "You've got mail", "You've got pictures", "You've got voicemail", "File's done",...

'We were freaking gorgeous': How Wicked Women captured lesbian sexuality in the late 80s. In the 1980s, two young Sydneysiders came across a women-run erotica magazine from San Francisco aimed at lesbians and were inspired to create something for their own community.

A story of one person taking control of an open-source programming site, after the new 'CEO' posted: "Any media uploaded to QB64 sites, are the property of the QB64 Project." (YouTube 'podcast' version of the same) There was some concern within the existing QB64 community as none of them appeared to have ever met, or even heard of, "RC Cola" before he was announced...

Angry At The World Right Now? Play Wolfenstein. [Kotaku] "Hey, everything sucks right now. There's no getting around it, and we're going to have to live with the consequences of this shit for the rest of our lives. So, if you're feeling angry about things, like say, the rise of fascism in America, why not grab the Wolfenstein games and kill some Nazis? I...

In a place where an act as simple as reading the Quran can be an act of defiance, the Taliban has banned women from hearing other women's voices in its latest attempt to impose their version of Islamic law on Afghanistan, including mandating that women refrain from performing Takbir—an Islamic expression of faith—and from reciting the Quran aloud, even in the presence of other...

The U.S. state flags have been unfairly maligned, and "Good Flag, Bad Flag" has been unjustifiably praised (SLYT, 1h33m). Every time a state or city in the U.S. sets up a flag redesign committee, the members of that committee are given a copy of the pamphlet "Good Flag, Bad Flag" by Ted Kaye and directed to judge submissions according to its guidelines. There is,...

"A real solution to the housing crisis": Council car parks in Sydney to become affordable housing. The Inner West Council in Sydney has a plan to turn four of its council car parks into 200 affordable homes for essential workers. Experts say there is a desperate need for homes to house key workers who can't afford to live where they work but such projects...

October was the 150th anniversary of Charles Ives's birth (in 1874). It's always a good time to reconsider him.Although famously an insurance executive, Ives had studied music at Yale and continued to work as an organist and to compose music even as he developed life-insurance packages for wealthy customers. He suffered from many ailments, real or mysterious, and after 1926, he stopped composing, saying...