~metafilter | Bookmarks (946)

Following are the "Best Albums of 2024" picks from a variety of media outlets. In most cases, these were a rank-ordered "Best 25" or "Best 50," although a few outlets simply did a best-of with no "winner" at no.1. I extracted the top 10 from those longer than 10 out of space considerations and listed them nos. 10 to 1, top to bottom. In...

US woman caught with golden gun in luggage at Sydney airport jailed for a year.That's the headline, but there is so much MORE in the article. Clown college! A calendar entry to "put gun in suitcase." Specific plans to pistol-whip potential threats. And a really great photo of the offender. Enjoy! Here's the song that inspired the title.

Censorship Trends for 2025, Part I Kelly Jensen for BookRiot, on Moms for Liberty's book-rating site, book-banning apps, LGBTQ book bans, Bible study in public schools, and Mike Huckabee's ties to new Texas curricula.

RAVEN is a new bird-inspired robot drone with impressive VTOL capabilities, and more importantly a very cute hopping ability.

"But beneath the dust jacket's bright yellows, purples and pinks is a novel of character studies that simmers with questions about work, class, generational divides and the expectations facing refugees making new homes in their asylums." [NPR]I started the audiobook of this recently, on the strength of the "humor (fiction)" tag in Libby, right off the bat, it was much more than that. More...

Of course, opinions about Canada's demise will vary, but for some influencers — Canadian and American — it seems to go beyond making an argument. In some cases, Canada seems to function as a concept, a cautionary tale, a funhouse mirror for an American-leaning audience; it's a useful target for taking aim at all the perceived ills of left-wing politics.And also today in the...

i apologize. crochet erasure was never my intention. there are just some things i've tried & realized i'm not good at, emphatically: 2 pins are not better than 1! erasure is significant, please forgive me [medium]. my penance; your #freethread. are there apologies you wish you could make? things you've learned? or write about whatever (if you'd rather, feel free to just rock out...

Good reading implies, and good writing demands of its readers, that the emotion should depend not on the name alone, but on the name understood. The name, indeed, rouses emotion, but rouses it through the memory of the thing; that is, through knowledge. And we have seen that no degree of unrealism in the imagination impairs this principle a whit. from CS Lewis: An...

Daft Hands - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger is a classic and well-liked YouTube video from the early days of YouTube in 2007 (previously). But there's also a more experimental followup(?) from 2018 that received a more... mixed... response: Daft Hands 2 - The Daftening (tw skull). Some YouTube comments "beggining of the video: omg finally a sequel after 10 years / finished the video:...

Canadian man leaps onto polar bear to defend wife. A man who leapt onto a polar bear to protect his wife from the attacking animal is expected to recover from serious injuries he sustained, police say. The incident occurred in Fort Severn First Nation — a community of about 360 people in northernmost Ontario.A scientist at Polar Bears International, Alysa McCall, told the Canadian...

"What was really interesting to see (was) that the people really talked with him in a serious way," Schmid said.

From the previous post: Amnesty International concludes Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians. Amnesty International's Israel branch distances itself from "genocide" claim". In the meantime, Israeli military kills four doctors in raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital in north Gaza. Over 1,000 doctors and nurses have been killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza, according to local authorities. Israel continues to bomb Lebanon despite a...

How a Mom Managed to Thru-Hike the Appalachian Trail With 13 Kids. Kids were 4 to 23 years old. Fb page

A plague of drones hovers over Northern New Jersey, spooking residents and stumping authorities. It's just military drills, right? No big deal. Probably coming out of Picatinny Arsenal.And yet...the governor of New Jersey attempts to calm local residents despite no acknowledgement on their parts as to what is going on. As the FBI implores everyone to report sightings and assist in this investigation. Confession:...

Romania's high court cancels results of first presidential runoff, announcing entirely new elections. The country's security council found that during the first round, Romania was the target of "aggressive hybrid Russian attacks." Călin Georgescu, a Russia-supporting fringe right candidate had been polling at around 4% before coming out on top during the first round of voting with 23% after his TikTok-based campaign gained last...

The Lost Book Exhibition. "Livres Imaginaires, Reid Byers' exhibition of Imaginary Books, is a collection of volumes that live only in other books: lost, unwritten, or fictitious books that have no physical existence. [Items include The Giant Rat of Sumatra, The Murder of Gonzago, and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as well as Marlowe's Maiden Holiday whose pages were used by a cook...

Today, the term "femicide" is used more frequently to describe the murder of women. Provost said the increased use of the word is a reflection of a society that is coming to terms with the high prevalence of gender-based violence.Former La Presse columnist and The Fifth Estate co-host, Francine Pelletier, recalls the day she found out she was on the shooter's hit list. Today,...

The story of a proposed biochar plant in Upstate NY that might have been an environmental win and environmental loss all at once.Biochar is used in agriculture as a soil amendment where it can also bind heavy metals. It also can effectively sequester carbon. Moreau, NY is a small town on the Hudson River not far from GE plant that released PCBs for 30...

World's oldest known wild seabird, an albatross named Wisdom, lays egg at 74. Wisdom the Laysan albatross lays another egg this year at the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in Hawaii with a new mating partner.

The etcetera is background, something that is part of a scene or sentence—it cannot be done away with, and yet it needn't be paid much attention: this seems to be the ethic of the creative process. A close approximation of this decision-making process might be how we decide to crop photos—isolating our face and body from a group, for example, or cutting out the...

Mike Duncan, the mind behind the podcasts The History of Rome (previously) and Revolutions (previously) has a new fictional podcast about the Martian Revolution of the 22nd Century.Duncan brings his considerable historical studies to bear on the SF story of political and economic turmoil. Slightly annoyingly, it does not have its own feed, but can be accessed via the Revolutions podcast on any podcatcher...

The sociologist Matthew Desmond believes that being poor is different in the U.S. than in other rich countries. Why do so many Americans live in poverty? Because so many rich people benefit from it.

These playlists preserve a slight human touch, representing user "folksonomies," or organic, user-generated systems of classifying content compared to boring corporate categories like "mid-20s white woman who likes pop-rock." They set the scene, address the listener, and offer a seductive promise—that however you ended up listening, whether by direct search or through an automated recommendation, this group of songs is bespoke and meant just...

Republicans don't care if women die from abortion bans — but they don't want you to know about it. Even before abortion bans were enacted in 2021 (Texas) and 2022 (trigger laws in multiple states), the US had by far the highest rate of maternal mortality of any high-income nation. Per 100,000 live births, the American rate of maternal mortality was (in 2022) 22.3,...