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Ukraine today pulled off one of the most audacious attacks of the war — a coordinated attack on four Russian air fields and a naval base by a special operation called Spiderweb. This one is right up there with the sinking of the Moskva and the truck bomb attack on the Kerch Bridge.Ukraine's special forces launched at least 116 of them from inside trucks...

Welcome to the first Pride Month LGBTQIA+ News Post. We're all beautiful on our own way.. Let's get things started with a list of pride festivals across the world!The Bad News The Special Rapporteur for Violence against Women and Girls for the United Nations, Reem Alsalem, has released an interim report claiming that being allowed to self-identify gender is "the biggest barrier to ending...

Conflict in South Sudan has devolved from the 2018 R-ARCSS, a peace agreement ostensibly unifying two warring sides (the reigning South Sudan People's Defence Forces and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army- in Opposition), to a state of disorganized regional and ethnic conflict, stoked by internal and external actors for their own benefit. Jousha Craze, interviewed on American Prestige (previously), provides a detailed breakdown of...

You're in a rush and you need to grab a bottle of wine for a special occasion. You've got $40 and no preference for red or white, but you like wines with animal labels. Which wine are you buying? from The pour-igin of species [The Pudding]

The Video Game History Foundation (previously) has unveiled a collection of over 100 hours of video from Cyan's history, including interviews and production footage, from the original Myst game (1993) all the way to Myst V: End of Ages (2005.) They also posted a highlight video.In the blog post announcing the collection, the VGHF notes that it was prompted by Philip Shane's work on...

Possible subspecies of endangered Leadbeater's possum found in New South Wales. Forest ecologist Professor David Lindenmayer says the shock discovery of critically endangered Leadbeater's possum is likely a new subspecies. (Australia)(Incidentally, this is my 1000th post on Metafilter.)

Corgi on a skateboard, corgi on a skateboard, corgi on a skateboard, corgi on a skateboard, corgi on a skateboard, corgi on a skateboard, corgi on a skateboard (corgi on a skateboard, corgi on a skateboard)

'The bot asked me four times a day how I was feeling': is tracking everything actually good for us? (Guardian)

Blaxell writes transness. She writes transly. And writing transly means more than writing a body. It means writing a world in which world and body are kin. This transness doesn't turn backward toward a body's past or away from the gazes of others, back into solitary orbit. When Blaxell does transness—and she's not just writing transness; she's doing transness—it turns outward. It lives. It...

Farmers already pleased with arid land rehabilitated with native seeds. Pastoralists in the far west of New South Wales are trialling new ways to manage arid landscapes by re-introducing native seeds to make the environment more rain-ready. (Australia)

AI Hallucination Cases Paris research fellow Damien Charlotin is compiling misuse of AI from legal decisions around the world. "This database tracks legal *decisions* in cases where generative AI produced hallucinated content – typically fake citations, but also other types of arguments. It does not track the (necessarily wider) universe of all fake citations or use of AI in court filings." Click the arrows...

May 31st 1985 Tornado Outbreak During the evening hours of Friday, May 31, 1985, just as people were getting ready to enjoy a late Spring weekend, one of the deadliest tornado outbreaks in United States history took place. A total of 43 tornadoes carved paths of destruction across the Northeast U.S. and Canada.These tornadoes affected eastern Ohio, western and central Pennsylvania, western New York,...

Say what you will about the uneven expansion of Medicaid, it created a natural laboratory to study its cost effectiveness: "Mortality reductions accrued not only to older age cohorts, but also to younger adults, who accounted for nearly half of life-years saved due to their longer remaining lifespans and large share of the low-income adult population. [...] Our findings suggest that lack of health...

Telling Lies was released as a downloadable track, which sold over 300,000 downloads, all the way back in 1996. A year later, the Earthling concert would be "cybercast" online, in an era when most home internet connections could barely handle streaming audio. These moves were groundbreaking, at the time, but also exactly what you might expect of a major artist trying to reach fans...

For more than two decades Hu Anyan was one of the 300 million internal migrant workers who are the lifeblood of the world's second-biggest economy. For nearly 10 years he recorded his observations on a second-hand Huawei phone, an early Chinese-made rival to the first generation of iPhones, with a clunky Android operating system and a screen resolution about one-fifth of the quality of...

Preschoolers soak up lost language like sponges. Darkinjung was considered a lost Aboriginal language, but community elders on the NSW Central Coast hope a new program for preschool students will change that. (Australia)

Dallas was one of the last big cities in America where a working family could buy a house. No longer. And it's not because of zoning policy—it's because of corporate consolidation and private equity.The biggest failure of the last administration — and arguably the primary reason that voters "threw the bums out" and put Trump in office — was the cost of housing. The...

Hi, all. Metafilter is electing a new Board to run the site and replace its Interim Board. Currently we have a three member Board, but the new Bylaws being discussed and amended here include a possible range of 3-12 members. While we're figuring exact details (like the process for holding an election being discussed here), it would be helpful to know how many MeFites...

"We Jam Econo catches a lot of what made the Minutemen great, from Boon's jagged riffs to Watt's laser-focused aesthetic vision. But unlike so many other behind-the-scenes rock-docs, it's haunted not by band conflict, but by the massive loss to music and the culture at large when Boon was killed."Has not aged a motherfucking day.

A man famous for his love of style, and idolised for his own, was in fact guilty of crimes against it. His thousand delicious turns of phrase and snaps of dialogue are real and redeeming. But they're a part of a whole for which the words "too far" don't go far enough. At risk of flirting with the talent myth, it had once seemed...

Quolls ignited couple's love and lifelong fight to save the animals. Joel and Andrea Little's love of eastern quolls brought them together more than two decades ago. They now run their own sanctuary to help protect the species. (Article also contains several cute photos of quolls.)

However innovative the visual style of Elevators turned out, it is Miles Davis' breathtaking trumpet score that elevates the film to a mid-century classic. Davis' presence in French society happened to coincide with the height of his artistic genius, catalyzing the evolution of jazz, film, and the boundaries of artistic expression. Jazz had been part of cinema since the late 1920s but Davis' work...

Exactly what it says on the side of the box (slyt) This is Prince before he was PRINCE. Happy listening, everyone!

Mike (Seth Skorkowsky,) Todd (Seth Skorkowsky,) Dweebles (Seth Skorkowsky,) and their game master (Seth Skorkowsky) discuss Indiana Jones' impact in Raiders of the Lost Ark. [YT ~7m]Seth Skorkowsky is an author of fantasy novels and game supplements, but is best known as a tabletop RPG YouTuber. His channel reviews materials for games like Traveller and Call of Cthulhu, with Jack the NPC (Seth Skorkowsky)...

I was invited by Westtown School to give a speech—as a language expert—about the importance of learning languages, in front of a full auditorium of high school and middle school students. But instead of just telling the students why language matters... I decided to show them.

How an empty building in Melbourne's Central Business District was transformed into a home. In the middle of a housing crisis, when a sizeable amount of commercial real estate is sitting vacant, the Make Room project is billed as a blueprint for giving under-utilised buildings new life as residential spaces - and lowering carbon emissions in the process.

Since a joint U.S.–Israel plan put a nonprofit in charge of aid distribution in Gaza, at least nine people have been killed and 47 injured. "This is what happens when you try to replace the humanitarian system with a political agenda," said Abdalwahab Hamad, Gaza office manager for the Palestinian humanitarian group Juhoud. "Those thousands of Palestinians, starving and desperate, stormed the distribution center,...

Youtube user Jsach3 has just uploaded the original pilot of The Gong Show. Hosted by Gary Owens and featuring a different set, intro and two gongs. Judges for the pilot are Jo Anne Worley, Arte Johnson, Adrienne Barbeau, and Richard Dawson. The footage includes various pickup shots that were done after the competition.

Get your local weather, retro Weather Channel-style. A re-implementation of the WeatherStar system (wiki) . Blog post by the creator describing it: WeatherStar 4000+ (and followup: Modernizing the WeatherStar 4000).

"A panel of federal judges on Wednesday blocked President Trump from imposing some of his steepest tariffs on China and other U.S. trading partners, finding that federal law did not grant him 'unbounded authority' to tax imports from nearly every country around the world. The ruling, by the U.S. Court of International Trade, delivered an early yet significant setback to Mr. Trump, undercutting his...

You know that accent. One technical way to describe it is pre-nasal trap-backing, which is to say, trap sounds more like "trop." Add the use of like as both a filler word (more formally, a discourse marker) and sometimes a quotative—"She was like, 'Let's go!' "—and there it was: a California accent at last. from Californian Spoken Here [Alta; ungated]

The science behind Tasmanians wearing shorts in frosty winters. The great Tasmanian sport of spotting shorts wearers in winter is fast approaching. But while some people seem impervious to the chill, there are times when even the toughest nuts should put on some pants.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of one of the most conscience-searing chapters in rock history: the Del Fuegos making a Miller Beer ad.Deep Cuts And Lost Chords: The Fiery Legacy of The Del Fuegos

This is a fascinating 3 hour + conversation with Robinson Erhardt (who cleverly asks a few open-ended questions, and doesn't interrupt the long, detailed answers).

Baxter Dury's career - CW as this is working class London, language is very 'earthy', some imagery NSFW. I found Baxter during Lockdown looking for new London music using postcodes [London uk.gov map 2.4Mb .pdf] on twitter, initially I'm Not Your Dog, just to see what was playing (and hopefully originated) in certain areas.Baxter's father Ian was well known - even if he didn't...

"We received a photograph of a very sad-looking boreal owl covered in the muck you might find in the pit of these vault toilets," McCarthy said. "That image evoked emotion and inspired ingenuity to think about a preventative path to ensuring that that doesn't happen for other cavity-nesting wildlife." from Poo-Poo Project Saves Wyoming Owls, Other Birds From Horrible Public Toilet Deaths

A short video series in promotion of The Animation Guild was made by a partnership between Jellybox Studio and Animation Workers Ignited. The video series involves Umbert Actually, a union organizer, explaining the state of the animation industry to Misterman Guyfella. The videos were spread among artists both in and outside of the guild, eventually leading artists to ship the two mascots under the...

"As the anthem reminds us: The true north is indeed strong and free," he said, which received applause from the room. (slCBC ongoing coverage)And ever so briefly, the US ambassador to Canada made it About the US's fee-fees. (Also, he's mad at us for boycotting goods and tourism from an authoritarian country.)

ICE Arrests Mississippi Father at His Citizenship Hearing, Threatening Deportation. "The group that has been growing the most is immigrants with no criminal charges and no criminal conviction," Kocher said. "The government's narrative that they're targeting criminals is not bulletproof. They're picking up a lot of people who don't have any criminal history at all." In Kocher's analysis, since January, detentions of immigrants with...

"It's feeling like this wonderful family, and that's one of the best parts." How libraries are turning into a home away from home for homeschoolers.

Critically-endangered Mary River cod found feasting on invasive tilapia. A routine survey confirms conservationists' hope that the apex predator will take care of its pest fish problems when big enough.

How do you sleep How's your sleep? Where and when do you sleep best? Talk about your dreams. Both the sleepy kind and IRL.

Part of this process, for me and others, was confronting and accepting the critical establishment's judgment of the books we once loved as sophomoric rather than truly artful. At some point, the very qualities that we had found so tantalizing—the romanticization of excess, the default cynicism toward all accepted values and notions of decency, the rage, the celebration of irresponsible behavior, the dogmatic defense...

Marcel Ophuls, the German-born filmmaker whose powerful documentary The Sorrow and the Pity exploded the myth of widespread French resistance to the Nazi occupation during World War II, died over the weekend in France. He was 97.

Most Americans recall the Revolutionary battles of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, but as the nation turns 250 residents living where it happened are celebrating one of the first, and most impressive, rebel victories.

Canada fielded four divisions of bicycle calvary in WWI. And over a thousand bicycles were brought ashore on D-Day by the 14,000 Canadians tasked with taking Juno beach. Recently one of the bikes made it home after being love by a single meter reader for 76 years.

While you're interacting with an AI model, that model is, in turn, building its own model of you. What happens when the assumptions it makes go astray? And how might we go astray once we learn to control them? Our own Jonathan Zittrain digs in.

The cosmetic trend peaked in the 18th century, but not before it turned precedent on its head. Two centuries earlier, any kind of distinctive mole or facial marking – far less a face covered in esoteric beauty patches – would've been considered 'the work of the devil' and elicited accusations of witchcraft followed by a burning at the stake. Suddenly, cosmetics were being explored...