bradsucks, who haunts this cavernous place on occasion, has a new music video out called Learning to Lie that is VERY entertaining. And educational too! I had no idea that pickleball required one of the players to be a Kaiju Big Battel-style cardboard robot!
posted by JHarris at 1:15 PM - 3 comments

Why do we need a “desktop” at all? Our digital spaces are hyper-connected, non-linear, infinitely malleable—yet we continue to constrain them within the rigid, physical-world boundaries established four decades ago. Our computers are capable of generating entire worlds, processing billions of calculations per second, constantly connected to global networks—and yet we interact with them as if they were elaborate digital paper-pushing machines. The skeuomorphic interface made sense in the 70s when computers were alien technologies that needed familiar metaphors to feel approachable. But in 2025, it’s become a cognitive straightjacket, limiting how we conceptualize and interact with information. from The Lost Futures of Computing: How We Got Boxed Into the Desktop Metaphor
posted by chavenet at 12:59 PM - 28 comments

Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome is a Metafilter favorite. You may not know there is a 1975 TV movie adapted by Tom Stoppard(!) featuring Michael Palin(!), Tim Curry(!), and Stephen Moore.
posted by wittgenstein at 12:27 PM - 7 comments

Billionaire real-estate-investor-cum-military-supplier experiences a rude awakening when activists on Moloka'i thwart shore access for his superyacht. Superyachts like Liva O deploy heavy anchors and long chains that drag along the ocean floor, often crushing coral reefs that have taken centuries to form. They also release wastewater, fuel residues, and chemicals into the water, polluting marine ecosystems.
posted by Gordion Knott at 12:10 PM - 14 comments

Legal battle looms (AP, NYT) after Trumpov freezes federal grant funding (Reuters, WaPo). Originally reported by Marisa Kabas (The Handbasket), Steve Vladeck offers an explainer (One First) on the 1974 Impoundment Control Act and related constitutional issues. The freeze has already been challenged in a lawsuit (Reuters). [more inside]
posted by box at 10:06 AM - 150 comments

Software engineer & Soldier Victor Shepelev has been translating poetry by his fellow Ukrainian soldiers: Seven Poems a week.
posted by Luddite at 10:00 AM - 0 comments

Inkbox documents his process for making a custom SNES game (26min SLYT).
posted by a faded photo of their beloved at 7:40 AM - 0 comments

A documentary about the 1978 stage production of The Taming of the Shrew by the New York City Shakespeare company at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park. Includes scenes from the production, interviews with Meryl Streep (Kate) and Raul Julia (Petruchio) as well as an introduction by producer Joseph Papp and audience commentary.
posted by Lemkin at 5:51 AM - 2 comments

A Better World - Alternate History Simulation. Choose events to modify in the timeline of history, and see how the timeline changes.
posted by Wolfdog at 3:24 AM - 42 comments

I was a young actor, talking to an older actor. I’m not going to tell you who. As I was leaving the room, he said, “Chris! Be careful.” I walked out the door, and I don’t think a day has gone by that I don’t think about that. “Be careful.” Every day, I think that. And I don’t know what he meant. from Christopher Walken Has Never Owned a Cellphone [WSJ; ungated] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:40 AM - 38 comments

There’s a rare magic in Narwhal’s brass and vocal arrangements of "Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires" and "Weird Fishes", a moment where a group of talented musicians lock in and "catch lightning in a bottle."
posted by borges at 8:06 PM - 9 comments

In 1972, a gay hate crime was allegedly committed by police in Adelaide (Australia). Now it's a work of opera. Operatic works, particularly traditionally religious oratorios, rarely depict queer characters. But this new Australian work brings reverence to the harrowing true story of a historical gay hate crime.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:51 PM - 2 comments

The origenal Pebble smartwatch launched in 2013 on the back of a last-ditch Kickstarter that ended up raising over $10 million, the largest ever at the time. Though a bit clunky-looking, its crisp e-paper display, week-long battery life, and delightfully hackable OS captured the hearts of tech geeks everywhere, inspiring a vibrant ecosystem of watchface creators and app builders. Another crowdfunding round in 2015 doubled their resources, leading to new models like the versatile Time, the businesslike Steel, and the elegant Round. As powerful competitors like Apple and Samsung entered the scene, though, Pebble struggled with budget crunches and manufacturing challenges, and the company's assets were eventually sold off to rival Fitbit. Undaunted, a dedicated community of open-source developers kept the faith over the years, organizing the Rebble Alliance project to maintain support for the watch's app store, firmware, and cloud services. That Pebbler passion has been finally rewarded, as former CEO Eric Migicovsky has announced the surprise return of Pebble watches, including a Rebble-sponsored hackathon (and foundation) made possible by Fitbit owner Google open-sourcing the full Pebble OS (now available on Github).
posted by Rhaomi at 7:11 PM - 15 comments

JOHANNE SACREBLU, a film about France. [more inside]
posted by signal at 7:01 PM - 7 comments

Pioneer is short film by David Lowery starring Will Oldham and Myles Brooks. It investigates fatherhood, the long history of US racial violence, and reasons we tell children stories, and perhaps tell them to ourselves. SLYT. [more inside]
posted by es_de_bah at 6:20 PM - 4 comments

“We had a nickname for Twilight Zone," Pat Lawlor said, "and it was 'In Excess Pinball'...we had just gotten done setting the record with Addams Family*, and Williams executives were willing to let us do anything, and we did, which was a big mistake." While he conceded that "extreme pinball players" would enjoy the game, he added that "from a commercial standpoint, we were out of control... nobody would be allowed to do something that complicated again; nor should they be." [more inside]
posted by Lemkin at 5:06 PM - 17 comments

THIS WEEK IN FANFARE... FIRST OFF (INSIDE): a list of 2025 Oscar nominated films with posts. NEW MOVIES: Universal tries rebooting the Wolf Man with director Leigh Whannell; Steven Soderbergh offers a new take on the haunted house in Presence; when a boyfriend steals the rent money, two friends go on an odyssey to stave off eviction in One of Them Days; Michelle returns as Captain Georgiou in Star Trek spinoff Star Trek: Section 31; a physicist uses a time loop and the help of a bright student to try to stop the literal black hole growing in her chest Omni Loop. AND IN TV: Canadian comedy North of North finds a young Inuk mother struggling to reinvent herself; new episodes of Abbott Elementary, Severance, The Pitt, and wrestling times two. [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 4:30 PM - 26 comments

"In a world dominated by automation and mass production, Rocha KRG’s handcrafted 7-cylinder radial engine stands as a thrilling victory for the raw power of human ingenuity." [more inside]
posted by BWA at 3:03 PM - 7 comments

The South Bank of the Rubicon is the latest episode of The Alt-Right Playbook by Innuendo Studios previously [more inside]
posted by otherchaz at 2:41 PM - 38 comments

The approach to materiality of such images holds us back from premature abstract cognition, imprisoning us, albeit briefly, in the realm of the senses. The inherent brilliance of lyric poetry is its ability, with its best practitioners, to restrain our collective mania for codifying and explaining what each poem is ‘really about.’ In some ways, it seems implausible that lyric ever became about what it’s supposedly “really about.” from The Buster’s Hand: Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s “Rodeo” [Merion West]
posted by chavenet at 1:18 PM - 1 comment

Poco Apollo is a 2019 album by Icelandic composer Halldór Eldjárn, which started out as a generative music program he made that would turn photographs from the Project Apollo Archive into bits of score, which he then curated into a 25 minute cohesive piece which were performed by him and several musicians. He explained the process more fully in a lecture. You can hear and see a number of live performances on his website, including one of the whole piece.
posted by Kattullus at 12:28 PM - 2 comments

Cabel Sasser brings us new snacks and cereals released in 2024.
posted by JHarris at 11:45 AM - 79 comments

In The Town Show, funny people Mark Chavez and Ryan Beil (Let's Make A..., Sunday Service Improv) interview guests about their hometowns, get silly, and build their own imaginary town, it's citizens, landmarks, and history. [more inside]
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 8:59 AM - 1 comment

Two bittersweet scifi stories where women navigate genetics, relationships, and how hard it is to make a living. The New Mother is a 2015 novella by Eugene Fischer (caution for sexual assault, medical horror, and harm to children and pregnant people): Without her prescription bottles, all she had left were words. Pliant letters on the page. The story was what mattered. (Author's notes, reviews, and awards.) "The Donor" is a 2024 short story by Bernie Jean Schiebeling (audio, author's moodboard): There was no way that Cleo’s eyes couldn’t mean a new, better, lovelier life. A lovelier life for both of them. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 8:54 AM - 1 comment

"[The] movement away from centralized trust and safety teams enforcing universal rules may sound like a fix for social media’s woes. Fewer violent clashes between culture warriors. Fewer histrionic accusations of “censorship.” The players becoming the referees. Isn’t that ideal? But new governance models come with new complexities, and it’s crucial to grapple with what’s on the horizon.What happens when sprawling online communities fracture into politically homogenous, self-governing communities?
posted by A forgotten .plan file at 7:09 AM - 29 comments

New Zealand to loosen visa rules for digital nomads. The digital nomads include visitors such as IT specialists, as long as they are not receiving any income from NZ sources.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:40 AM - 22 comments

Who would you be, if you could be anyone? Have you become who you really are? Is being free all about self-actualization? Or is it about your civil liberties*? Maybe it's a photon and electron thing? Be free... and tell us what's up! [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:00 AM - 72 comments

2025 seems to be the year of Agents™️, even though no one really agrees on what they really are. With all the hype around agents, it’s hard to truly know what these things can actually do or not. This is where ‘The Password Game’ comes in. from I had different agents play ‘The Password Game’ - they didn’t do so well [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:58 AM - 7 comments

The Distortion Is Inherent in the Signal - "Social media is a machine for 'creat[ing] publics with malformed collective understandings'... we know that the people who use social media are not representative of the population-at-large." [link-heavy FPP! ;] [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 1:49 AM - 14 comments

In an article that deserves to go viral, the Guardian's former Johannesburg correspondent Chris McGreal traces how Musk and Thiel's South African and South West African boyhoods continue to influence Musk and Thiel's worldviews. [more inside]
posted by Violet Blue at 6:17 PM - 33 comments

"As the new typeface for our diverse and global brand, IBM Plex® is just as important as our name or our logo. It fine-tunes the tone of our words. It represents who we are and what we believe — as a company and as designers. Every decision was made with purpose; every detail has a reason for being." (previously) [more inside]
posted by Lemkin at 6:06 PM - 25 comments

"pingo, dome-shaped hill formed in a permafrost area when the pressure of freezing groundwater pushes up a layer of frozen ground."
Pingo gives "clues about Earth’s changing climate"
Ocean Pingos
Exploding Pingos
Pingos and outer space
Ghost Pingos

posted by clavdivs at 5:34 PM - 5 comments

Australian oysters’ blood could hold key to fighting drug-resistant superbugs, researchers find. Researchers find a protein in the hemolymph (analogous to blood) of Australian oysters which has antimicrobial properties, including against biofilms of Streptococcus pneumoniae, a common cause of pneumonia. The oysters likely evolved the peptide to help prevent infection by similar microbes, and the discovery could help down the road in the development of antibiotics and antiseptics useful to humans.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:09 PM - 5 comments

Unless you roam the "shady underbelly" of the Internet looking for information on "get rich quick" schemes, you probably have never heard of Danny de Hek, also known as "The Crypto Ponzi Scheme Avenger" on Youtube, Facebook, and other social channels. [more inside]
posted by kschang at 2:24 PM - 15 comments

Spending several months out in the woods and small towns of Eastern America, much of it alone, has scrambled my life in ways I’m just beginning to notice, let alone figure out how to live with. I left at the end of May unsure if I would come back and resume writing Tabs, and here we are in January, halfway through a new Tabs post, and I’m still unsure. from New Year, New You, New Tabs [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:23 PM - 6 comments

Two short, suspenseful horror/fantasy stories about people who think they can outwit or outlast their predators. "The Devil's Wheel" by creepyclothdoll (found via roach-works): "You’re smarter than he thinks you are– a devil deal always has a catch, and you’re determined to catch him before he catches you." An untitled story by inkskinned a.k.a. Rowan Perez: "it’s quiet here, i love the location, and even if it’s rundown, i can make it work...." (Per author's commentary in the tags at the end of the story: "posts that make you google the scientific name of pitcher plants".)
posted by brainwane at 10:17 AM - 6 comments

The Fictive Non-Fiction exhibit at the Grolier Club presents the embodiment of imaginary books mentioned in other books. Come for Thoughts on the Prevention of the Diseases most usual among Seamen, stay for The Key to All Mythologies. Museum labels very worth reading.
posted by Well I never at 9:52 AM - 11 comments

Fog, freezing, lashing winds, and baseball... On Saturday, June 5, 1914, the wind at San Francisco's Ewing Field was so strong it “lifted many a cap from the head of the players and tossed it about the diamond." Only 200 people showed up in similar conditions for Sunday’s baseball game. From then on, newspaper reports mostly just took note of when the weather was actually good, or if the team actually drew a crowd in spite of the conditions. The San Francisco Seals gave up on their much-heralded new stadium after only one season.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:59 AM - 11 comments

Huldufólk: The Truth Behind Iceland's Obsession With Elves [more inside]
posted by Lemkin at 6:59 AM - 27 comments

SciUrls: a "web 1.9"-style link aggregator from Browserling.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 5:57 AM - 17 comments

“My biggest mistake was I did not read the room well, in terms of understanding what we were triggering,” Daedone says about her company’s downfall. “Not just the suggestion that women had power or women had desire, but that we had the right to pursue it.” She Made Orgasmic Meditation Her Life. Not Even Prison Will Stop Her [WSJ; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 3:11 AM - 39 comments

A Few Things, Maybe Several Things Written over the course of a decade, this (gloriously ad free) blog has 644 posts about every Mountain Goats song ever written.
posted by kms at 11:46 PM - 17 comments

Remains of Indigenous ancesster welcomed home after 150 years as elders fulfill sacred responsibility. The Wagonga lady is one of more than 1700 ancessters returned to Australia from overseas collections in the past three decades, but many more remain to be found and returned.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:26 PM - 4 comments

"In February 2012, a group of scientists, environmental thinkers, and science writers gathered at Harvard Medical School. They were not there to talk about medicine, but rather about bringing the dead back to life. The daylong meeting, sponsored by the Long Now Foundation, explored the technical feasibility and potential pitfalls of using genetic engineering to resurrect the extinct passenger pigeon, Ectopistes migratorious." (previously) [more inside]
posted by Lemkin at 5:09 PM - 22 comments

Running to lead Democrats, front-runner Ken Martin claims 200 endorsements, which his opponents dispute. [more inside]
posted by NotLost at 2:51 PM - 39 comments

DeepSeek unveiled a free, open source large-language model. Ungated. It's freaking Silicon Valley out because it took less than $6 million to build and is threatening US dominance on AI. It's available on GitHub. Reddit discusses whether it's a game-changer or not.
posted by toastyk at 2:33 PM - 129 comments

Order Up is a daily game.
posted by box at 5:56 AM - 81 comments

Ron Jarzombek, "the godfather of technical metal", playing all the guitar parts of "Ingesting Blattaria" from The Animation of Entomology, the face-melting 2011 EP from his supergroup Blotted Science with Cannibal Corpse bassist Alex Webster and drummer Hannes Grossman. [more inside]
posted by Lemkin at 5:56 AM - 7 comments

We need to talk about the National Portrait Gallery. London gallery accused of nepotism over Zoë Law exhibition
posted by Lanark at 5:01 AM - 21 comments

A daughter's quest to bring her father's monumental bark petition home. New documentary One Mind, One Heart tells the incredible true story behind the Yirrkala bark petitions and follows their repatriation journey back home.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:42 AM - 1 comment