~metafilter | Bookmarks (955)

In an interview with Bloomberg, outgoing San Francisco Muni director Jeffrey Tumlin discusses his experience with autonomous vehicles as part of his role managing SF's transit systems. (SLBloomberg)Overall, Tumlin feels that robotaxis have produced no real benefit overall for SF transit as a whole, and serve to displace the use of public transportation both in ridership and funding. He also notes that with autonomous...

Now, see this colored chart? Represented by about twenty-five colored lines is a diagram of my life. Gray is for vagueness. Everything, for me, has to be put in diagram or spatial form. The chart is a means of remembering. from A Diagram of My Life by Gerald Murnane [The Paris Review; ungated]

Food writer Dennis Lee ("whose main goal is to ruin food for everyone") attempts a recipe for "Blue Cheese Chicken Italiano" from a cookbook found in a thrift store. The secret ingredient? A Totino's pizza flipped upside down on top to act as the "crust." slSubstack, but you can also peruse past experiments like No Knead Gatorade Bread (previously) and The Olive Garden Hot...

"..there's no beating the game, no cheat code or special technique — you always die." Toronto artist Marie LeBlanc Flanagan created a video game in response to Ontario Premier Doug Ford's plan to rip out three busy bike lanes out of the Toronto core.You can play the game here.

Scotland has a proper, properly managed program to re-introduce Lynx to Scotland to help control overpopulation of deer, which can cause loss of trees, erosion and possible landslides. That's great! Unfortunately, an irresponsible person illegally released some Lynx into Scotland without the proper quarantine etc checks, which could have caused the death of two Lynx, or introduced new diseases. Fortunately, the Lynx have now...

Nearly everything you own, including the clothes you're wearing and the device your're reading this on, was delivered by a container ship.First, you have to design a container ship. Then, you have to build it. Of course, you've got to power it. Then you'll want to test it. Now you've got to load and unload all those containers. The Chinese are really good at...

Global temperature increases breached 1.5°C for the first time in 2024. Today the European Union's Copernicus Climate Service posted its 2024 Annual Climate Summary, which showed temperatures 1.5°C higher than pre-industrial levels."2024 was the warmest year in a multi-dataset record of global temperature going back to 1850... Multiple global records were broken, for greenhouse gas levels, and for both air temperature and sea surface...

Beloved duo Wallace & Gromit returned to our screens at Christmas, 34 years after their first appearance, in their second feature-length film, Vengeance Most Fowl (Fanfare thread). Group blog (-slash-arts-magazine) It's Nice That recently interviewed creator and director Nick Park, co-director Merlin Crossingham and supervising animator Will Becher about the plasticine pair's legacy and creating their new adventure.

Tired of seeing paintings of countless puffed-up toffs rendered in oils for posterity, German visual artist Volker Hermes breathes life into the boring old routine with his updates on Old Masters paintings. His Hidden Portraits use digital technology and collage to refocus our gaze on symbols of self-representation and social status embedded in such paintings.

'"The thing to remember is that Anita Bryant won that battle initially, but she did not win that war," said the historian Julio Capó Jr'. 'Bryant's public victory became her private devastation. Students listed Bryant as the "woman who had done the most damage in the world" in a 1978 Ladies Home Journal poll. The man they picked was Adolf Hitler.' Anti-gay rights campaigner...

Indefinite Backpack Travel. "In 2015 I got rid of everything I owned that didn't fit in a laptop backpack, and I've been living at this level of minimalism since. The idea is to only own what I need, which allows me to focus more, spend less, travel spontaneously and simplify my life." Jeremy Maluf posts yearly summaries of his backpacking adventures. In this overview,...

Edgar Maddison Welch, who shot up a DC pizzeria because of an online conspiracy theory that it was a front for a child sex slavery ring, was killed by police when he pulled a weapon on them during a traffic stop.The traffic stop occurred due to outstanding arrest warrants for the driver and Welch. When Welch was apprehended, he pulled a gun on the...

"At CES 2025, a company called Sybran Innovation showed off the Code27 Character Livehouse. It's an AI-powered digital purgatory that you can trap a small anime girl in, forever."

Sakiori is a hobby of making new cloth out of strips of old fabric salvaged from worn clothes. It comes from a time and place when cotton was a scarce commodity, but it lives on today because the result is a fabric with a unique aesthetic.Clothes made from synthetic fibers are a significant source of micro-plastic pollution. If this hobby caught on, it might...

From Awesome Games Done Quick 2025, four speedrunners play Super Mario Brothers at the same time, superimposed.

"In his one-hour stand-up special, D.J. Demers: Interpreted, Demers is raising the standard of accessible comedy with two versions of special, one complete with closed-captioning subtitles and an onstage American Sign Language interpreter, as well as descriptive captioning for the visually impaired." Canadian-born Demers is a Deaf comedian who does his stand-up in English (as opposed to ASL) and discusses some of the choices...

A Twinge of Saudade is an essay by Norwegian-British music critic Chal Ravens about Abba, going from their beginnings, through their glittering career, and their afterlife. She discussed the band, and the cultural moment in Sweden from which they hailed, and why they were at odds with Anglophone pop culture, with Thomas Jones on an episode of the LRB Podcast.

... is Tom Gauld's upcoming collection of his New Scientist cartoons. You can see ten pages from it on the Drawn & Quarterly site I've linked.

"What I wish I had was a list of now-obvious tips for keeping and running a home bar, and here is where I will keep them" , says Justin Duke, who believes much cocktail-related writing on the Internet is 'not particularly actionable to the genre of person who is like "I made this drink and it's tasty! How do I get better at this?"'...

The Gish gallop (/ˈɡɪʃ ˈɡæləp/) is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, with no regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time availableWe all know who this post is about, but I will not...

The amount and quality of this scholarship can be celebrated — or for conservative critics, decried — but the question here is, does it possess a distinct identity? And what is its impact? An identity to this academic Marxism is difficult to outline since little links the Marxist literary critic and the Marxist sociologist, except left-wing sympathies and occasional shared vocabulary. from American Marxism...

s32 unix clock. A cool visualization of the original signed 32-bit integer Unix time moving toward the 2038 ending of the epoch that began in 1970. More description in David Buchanan's announcement blog post about it (from 2023, but what is time?).