~metafilter | Bookmarks (1013)

'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...

Appearances, however, can be deceptive. And what is now true about the culture wars I have spent much of my career describing (and rebuking) is that beneath the apparent polarization, beneath our seemingly incommensurable differences, we increasingly inhabit a common culture. Yet this common culture is not constructive. It is not a culture rooted in a shared positive vision of what America is, should...

Some of the wealth of footage of the British folk/rock/jazz/blues quintet Pentangle to be found on YouTube: performing on Norwegian TV in 1968 (40m); concert and behind-the-scenes footage in a German TV documentary ca. 1970 (28m); in concert at the BBC in 1971 (30m); or playing in a Belgian TV studio in 1972 (30m).Previously at MetaFilter, posts marking the deaths of the band's guitarists...

World's first wooden satellite, developed in Japan, heads to space. The palm-sized LignoSat is tasked with demonstrating the cosmic potential of the renewable material as humans explore living in space.

It is often assumed that right-wing authoritarian and populist parties appeal primarily to negative feelings such as frustration, fear or alienation, and that positive sentiments appear in their discourse mostly in the form of nostalgia. Our hypothesis is that this description fails to apply to leaders in power. from They can do it. Positive Authoritarianism in Poland and Hungary [Frontiers]

"This time there is no intention to allow the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes--" - according to Amichai Stein, from Israel's Public Broadcasting Corporation (KAN), reporting in English, a recent IDF announcement this morning: ' The IDF announces: The division of the northern Gaza Strip into two parts has been completed, and we getting closer to the complete...

MeFi's own jpburns made a 60-page comic about his cancer diagnosis and treatment. It's on Amazon ($3), but you can get a free copy by signing up at malecare.org. jpburns has lots of other comics too! [via mefi projects]

CSIRO's new printing facility could put a solar panel in your pocket. Solar panels that can be printed out like newspapers and rolled up to fit in your pocket are one step closer thanks to a new development by Australian Government agency Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

This is the world I grew up in, a world in which I could be anything I dreamed and do whatever I dreamed of doing, as long as I had the skill. A world in which there were no real consequences; an ahistorical world, where things could be easily reset for the building of new dreams. My grandmother, I suspect, had never suffered from...

After two and a half years of negotiations, The New York Times Tech Guild has gone on strike (NYT Gift Link). "The guild said it was asking readers to honor its digital picket line by not playing Times Games products, such as Wordle, and not using the Cooking app." "Nearly 750 New York Times journalists and Times Guild members signed a new pledge pressing...

Between 1980 and 2021, Cinefex magazine was the quarterly journal of the visual effects industry covering mostly big budget movies, but also TV shows, commercials and even interactive experiences. It ended publication in 2021 due to the effect of the pandemic on film production, however the content remained available through their iOS app... until iOS 17 killed it... or did it?. Regardless, Don Shay,...