~metafilter | Bookmarks (945)

"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?).

Patti LeConte and her husband were driving home from Ocean City on New Year's morning when they saw traffic slowing near Hebron in Wicomico County. As they got closer, the Ellicott City couple realized the reason why: A 6-foot-tall bird was loping down Route 50.

The prevalence of documentaries about musicians is a curse, because most of these films do a terrible job of showcasing music. One rare and moving exception is the work of the director Robert Mugge, whose film Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise -- about the musician and bandleader whose multimedia and pan-cultural activities made him one of the prime artists of Afrofuturism -- is one...

Via her youtube shorts, Shawna The Mom has been providing catharsis and joy throughout the holidays to everyone who is plagued with narcisstic family members. Watch Shawna and her excellent husband John stand up to John's mother Barb and his sister Jen. Watch Jen get her own redemption arc!It begins: Barb and Jen try to manipulate Shawna, the tired mom of a toddler and...

"The study, led by the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and the University of California, Davis, is the first to chronicle widespread carnivorous behavior among squirrels." More about this long-term squirrel study.

Giant Pandas Bao Li and Qing Bao play in the snow. The National Zoo in Washington, DC, has a new pair of pandas after returning three pandas at the end of 2023 to China. Bao Li and Qing Bao will be visible to the public beginning January 24, 2025.

The Interim Board of The MetaFilter Community Foundation has moved ahead with creating a moderation oversight committee. Here's more information and how to get involved. If this is not your jam, no worries, there will be additional opportunities to get involved and support MetaFilter. That's it, that's the cross-post. But since this is the blue, some additional links below:Everything in moderation: A case study...

Over the years, Donald E. Knuth has produced a slew of bestsellers on topics that might seem to have only limited appeal, most notably the arts of computer programming and mathematical typography. His latest book takes on a subject so challenging it has to hide behind a coy title: Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About. What is this subject that dare not speak...

No, in the Marvel Universe, Hitler did not die by suicide. He died by being burned alive by the original Human Torch. Though they did Save Hitler's Brain, as Maxwell Yezpitelok's article also explains. (Title taken from Maxwell's skeet about it).

The idea of men who need new stories but refuse to read them is also exaggerated and hyperbolic. It has become its own kind of story. It's a legend, one that's been repeated for years, haunted by zombie statistics and dubious facts. Its continued flourishing says a lot about what our culture worries about and all the things we hope will heal us. from...