~metafilter | Bookmarks (938)

IMG_0001: "Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in "Send to YouTube" button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives. [...] I made a bot that crawled YouTube and found 5 million of these videos! Watch them below, ordered randomly."(Ben Wallace initially wrote about digging through this...

An 83-year-old short story by Borges portends a bleak future for the internet? A July 2024 paper published in Nature explored the consequences of training AI models on recursively generated data. It showed that "irreversible defects" can lead to "model collapse". So how bad might this get? Fiction writers have explored some possibilities (via The Conversation)

I turn Art into Sports (and vice versa) | NO AI USED [BlueSky, also on Instagram and Substack]

A roundup of deals on small press book deals, like Haymarket Books' 40% off sale on all titles and 5 for $55 Book Bundles on stuff like freeing Palestine, fighting fascism, border politics, prison abolition, and reproductive justice. Many more under the fold.AK Distribution's free ebooks (like Shane Burley's No Pasarán!: Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis and adrienne maree brown's Emergent Strategy:...

The Murder Mystery Linking a Bird Specimen at the National Museum of Natural History to the Mysterious Death of an Arctic Explorer. In 1871, a naturalist aboard the U.S.S. Polaris collected scientific specimens — and possibly poisoned the ship's captain. (Smithsonian Magazine.)

"How to Bury a Gentile" is a "short vaguely historical vaguely spooky ghost story about Jews and burial rites". "There is absolutely something in the Talmud about this and I've just forgotten it, because I'm an idiot and I'm half asleep and there is a goy on my doorstep asking me to go out to the cemetery with him at midnight to bury a...

More elaborately-staged murder parties without published rulesets preceded it, but "Murder in the Dark" was a parlor game where three or four players took on the roles of victim, murderer, and detective(s) while the remaining players were generally just themselves as they all acted out a pretend murder--usually in the dark, and sometimes with an "Assassin"-like procedure--followed by an investigation in which the detective(s)...

"We do this all over the U.S., and we've never been attacked like this" Residents of Columbus, Ohio express their displeasure to a group of visiting Nazi protesters

From lion dances to banh mi, these aged care homes are doing things differently. Demand for culturally appropriate aged care is booming as some migrant communities shake the taboo of placing elderly relatives in professional care. With more than a third of Australians over the age of 65 born overseas, demand for linguistically and culturally appropriate care is continuing to grow.

"They were telling me that a squirrel for dinner did not split very far between three people," Keim recalled. "At that moment, I thought ... 'I'm going to airdrop them a turkey.'"Classically nonchalant Alaska:" A turkey was once missing for five days before it was found, but the only casualty so far has been a lost ham, Keim said."

Brother of Bride Wedding Speech (standing ovation) [June 2023] In which a very good and charming speech is given in a room full of friends and family, all of whom are quite attractive and wealthy, at an extremely gorgeous wedding. It is a mesmerizing nine minutes. Opinions may vary.[I hope you'll pardon the editorializing,] but as a person who is unlikely to be either...

An oral history of the greatest Thanksgiving movie ever made from Jason Bailey for Vanity Fair. Article from 2022, the 35th anniversary of the release of Planes, Trains and Automobiles.If the main link has been posted before, apologies, but I couldn't find it. PTA previously in FanFare. It's been 30 years since the world lost John Candy and 15 since John Hughes left us,...

Body camera footage as country cop wrangles lizard into paddy wagon. A police officer says he found a large crowd gathered on a West Australian street after residents had climbed onto a shed roof to escape a 2 metre (6.5 feet) goanna. The goanna was later released into suitable habitat further away from human housing.

"When I find myself dipping into the dark, I know that I can call up a Nelson town on the computer, and I begin to do the research, and I begin to conduct the interviews, and I start reaching out to people, and it just brings me back." Then it is onto the next town, the next dot on a map, where Nelson is...

Peer Gynt-inspired quilts If you like classical music, patchwork quilting, or in-depth explanations of creative design process, you will absolutely love this blog series about 4 Peer Gynt-inspired quilts. BONUS: The Melbourne-based artist (and musician/computer geek) Deborah Pickett was inspired by this painting based on Ravel's Boléro.

Shirley, you can't be serious. Abrahams, a film director and writer behind hit slapstick comedies like "Airplane!," "Hot Shots!," the "Naked Gun" series and more, died Tuesday, his son Joseph confirmed to Variety. He was 80.With his childhood friends Jerry and David Zucker, Abrahams formed the filmmaking trio, called Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker, and popularized the spoof genre of the 1980s. "Jim Abrahams redefined...

Annabel Crabb deliciously skewers the Australian Government's latest social media legislation in With its social media ban, parliament delivers a performance piece of legislative enshittification that rises to the cultural moment (Australian ABC)Ed note- frustrating times and frustrating politics, mostly wanting to share Annabel's quality writing, which I find a joy to read.

Ireland heads to the polls on Friday with the expected incumbents expected to continue in power.Ireland's economy is booming - there are budget surpluses, plus recently there was a 14 billion euro windfall from Apple (that's roughly €3000 for every person in Ireland). Brexit has been a largely positive thing for Ireland, in that any foreign investor looking to expand into Europe, looks at...

This blog post is a bit ... different. Normally, a blog post is a static document, and the direction of communication is from the screen to the user. But this piece requires you to interact. You're not just reading the content; you'll actually change the story of the blog post as you interact with it. This makes the piece a bit more experimental, but...

Brian Krebs: Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles this week unsealed criminal charges against five men aged 20 to 25, alleged to be members of "Scattered Spider," a hacking group responsible for dozens of cyber intrusions at major U.S. technology companies between 2021 and 2023, including LastPass, MailChimp, Okta, T-Mobile and Twilio.

One Amazon influencer makes a living posting content from her beige home. But after she noticed another account hawking the same minimal aesthetic, a rivalry spiraled into a first-of-its-kind lawsuit. Can the legal system protect the vibe of a creator? And what if that vibe is basic?Sheil runs what is essentially a one-woman marketing operation, making product recommendations, trying on outfits, and convincing people...