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You could call them “sky flowers,” but that doesn’t really make sense either—after all, the faded blue behind each squiggle is water, not sky, and the squiggles themselves don’t represent solid objects in any tangible, meaningful way. But they look right. The reds and greens and yellows add life and color in a way that a flat blue might not. Those odd shapes, suspended motionless with no clear reason or value, establish a tone. There are a lot of things that don’t make sense on SpongeBob SquarePants. But there’s a clear and coherent vision that runs through the entire show, from the design of SpongeBob’s kitchen-sponge body down to the squeaky-balloon sound of his footsteps. It’s a perspective, and a warm, specific, crazy little world. Of course it has sky flowers in it. What else would be up there?

Today marks 25 years since the original broadcast of "Help Wanted" -- the pilot episode of marine biologist Stephen Hillenburg's educational comic that became a delightful romp of "relentless optimism and fundamental sweetness", a hothouse flower of inventive and absurdist imagination, a cultural touchstone for multiple generations, and one of the most iconic and beloved animated franchises of the 21st century. Are you ready, kids?
posted by Rhaomi to MetaFilter on May 1 at 3:55 PM
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People who care about internet monoculture and control are often told they’re nostalgists harkening back to a pioneer era. It’s fiendishly hard to regenerate an open and competitive infrastructure for younger generations who’ve been raised to assume that two or three platforms, two app stores, two operating systems, two browsers, one cloud/mega-store and a single search engine for the world comprise the internet. (Noema sl)
posted by Kitteh to MetaFilter on May 2 at 5:19 AM
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Motown Junkies is a blog where Steve Devereux is reviewing the entire Motown singles discography in sequential order from the beginning. You can also browse tracks by songwriter, label and artist. He’s currently up to 1966, though he’s been on hiatus for a few years. He also used to present Discovering Motown on Radio Cardiff, and the archive is on Mixcloud.
posted by Kattullus to MetaFilter on May 6 at 9:05 AM
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Kendrick Lamar and Drake (aka Aubrey Graham), two of the biggest active hip hop artists and former collaborators, are seriously beefing in a major way that hasn't been seen since Tupac vs Biggie. Last October, Drake dropped a track, First Person Shooter, where his collaborator J Cole named the two of them and Kendrick as "the big three". Kendrick, who has a competitive streak, took umbrage at being put on the same level as the other two and replied in Like That "it's just big me". What might've started as a somewhat professional competition has rapidly gone nuclear since Kendrick took shots at Drake's Blackness, fitness as a parent, and masculinity in his track titled "euphoria" and Drake responded with allegations of domestic abuse, infidelity, and cuckoldry in Family Matters. As of the latest, Kendrick has accused Drake of hiding a 2nd child and being a sexual predator of underaged girls.
posted by ndr to MetaFilter on May 5 at 7:07 AM
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Sumatran orangutan becomes first wild animal seen using medicinal plant to treat wound.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries to MetaFilter on May 3 at 1:42 AM
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The California man who hid for 6 months in a secret room inside Circuit City
posted by brundlefly to MetaFilter on Apr 30 at 12:43 PM
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At the frame shop there is so much beauty, it can’t be real. Maybe this is the afterlife, I think. Or purgatory. ... When my boss stomps up from his frame-building cellar and sees me, he always barks: Are you still here? Which is literal, because I’m new and only working part time, but also existential because how am I still here—or back here? It’s been a year since I returned to Chicago, but it still doesn’t feel like real life from Don’t Bleed on the Artwork: Notes from the Afterlife by Wendy Brenner [Oxford American; ungated]
posted by chavenet to MetaFilter on May 1 at 1:20 AM
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Tom Walker tries desperately, with halting success, to complete some very basic missions in Grand Theft Auto 4 while all the cars on the map lose their fucking minds. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Come for the comedy car deaths, stay for the slow evolution of a "this is a horror stealth game" playstyle that makes it at all possible to make progress.
posted by cortex to MetaFilter on May 6 at 9:37 AM
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For many people, the first time they tried to take control of a computer centered around learning to program in BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), a simple, interpreted programming language designed around easily-understandable keywords and syntax. BASIC turned 60 a couple of days ago, so find one of the many online BASIC interpreters and write yourself a little bit of history.
posted by hanov3r to MetaFilter on May 3 at 9:25 AM
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What happens when your toddler is haunted by memories that aren’t hers? In Louisiana in 2000, 2-year-old James Leininger would wake screaming, repeating the same phrases to his baffled and disturbed parents: “Airplane crash on fire! Little man can’t get out!” Over the following year, a story unspooled in memories and drawings: He was a World War II pilot whose plane took off from a boat, and he died when he was shot down by Japanese forces. James offered names of people and places, and his account would ultimately become one of the most prominent and thoroughly documented “cases of the reincarnation type,” or CORT, ever recorded.
posted by Toddles to MetaFilter on May 2 at 8:05 PM
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Shakespeare toys with numerous European languages throughout his work, including Italian, French, Spanish, and Dutch. Often, these are spoken in thick accents, with comedic pronunciation. The same holds true for his use of the various British dialects—Scots, Welsh, Cornish, and Irish—heard in scruffy taverns or high courts. In Henry V, soldiers fracture the King’s English while the king himself and a French princess descend into a comical Franglais courtship. Yet, no matter how garbled the speech, playgoers can usually identify distinct languages and dialects—that is, until they bump up against what scholars have called the “invented language,” “unintelligible gabble,” and “‘Boskos thromuldo boskos’ mumbo-jumbo” in his comedy "All’s Well That Ends Well." from I Understand Thee, and Can Speak Thy Tongue: California Unlocks Shakespeare’s Gibberish [LARB]
posted by chavenet to MetaFilter on May 4 at 1:08 AM
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The process of making a mirror ball. The last remaining mirror ball manufacturing factory in Japan. [14m30s] Depicts making a mirror ball. Actually pretty interesting.
posted by hippybear to MetaFilter on May 6 at 5:39 PM
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It’s weird because the correct answer to the query “what is the best printer” has not changed, but an entire ecosystem of content farms seems motivated to constantly update articles about printers in response to the incentive structure created by that robot’s obvious preferences. Pointing out that incentive structure and the culture that’s developed around it seems to make a lot of people mad, which is also interesting! Anyway, here’s the best printer for 2024: a Brother laser printer. You can just pick any one you like; I have one with a sheet feeder and one without a sheet feeder. Both of them have reliably printed return labels and random forms and pictures for my kid to color for years now, and I have never purchased replacement toner for either one. Neither has fallen off the WiFi or insisted I sign up for an ink-related hostage situation or required me to consider the ongoing schemes of HP executives who seem determined to make people hate a legendary brand with straightforward cash grabs and weird DRM ideas.

Best printer 2024, best printer for home use, office use, printing labels, printer for school, homework printer you are a printer we are all printers / After a full year of not thinking about printers, the best printer is still whatever random Brother laser printer that’s on sale. [Previously]
posted by Rhaomi to MetaFilter on May 5 at 11:45 AM
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How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fab . By Brian Potter of Construction Physics.
posted by russilwvong to MetaFilter on May 4 at 8:57 AM
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Who Has the Right to “Disrupt” the University? Perhaps the most egregious example of the administrator-as-disruptor is Gordon Gee, currently the president of West Virginia University (WVU), whose administration pushed through extraordinarily deep cuts to the institution’s academic offerings last fall. During a meeting of the faculty senate, Gee said “I want to be very clear that the university is not dismantling higher education. We are disrupting it . . . And many of you know I am a firm believer in disruption.”
posted by spamandkimchi to MetaFilter on May 6 at 3:38 PM
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Remember back in 2017-2020 when everyone was aglow with the warmth and camaraderie of the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen? And then, well, Milkshake Duck happened. But not all is lost....
posted by drewbage1847 to MetaFilter on May 1 at 1:06 PM
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By leveraging a unique large dataset and new techniques for exploring this dataset, our paper highlights the diversity of moral dilemmas experienced in daily life, and helps to build a moral psychology grounded in the vagaries of everyday experience. from A Large-Scale Investigation of Everyday Moral Dilemmas, in which Philosophers are studying Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole?” [Vox]
posted by chavenet to MetaFilter on May 3 at 1:41 PM
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Ralph Nader is loyal to one pen: the Papermate Flair. But Nader claims that the pens are drying out quicker then they used to. He reached out to Wirecutter (a NYT property) and they investigated. Archive.is link: https://archive.is/54jtw
posted by kimberussell to MetaFilter on May 4 at 8:17 AM
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Ken Klippenstein resigns from The Intercept. In his announcement released through his newsletter, Ken details some of the machinations between the management class controlling journalism, and the journalists out there trying to do the work. Klippenstein will continue publishing his work independently along with legendary editor and national security researcher William Arkin, as well as FOIA specialist Beth Bourdon.
posted by slogger to MetaFilter on Apr 30 at 11:04 AM
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The Media Matters study of tradwife influencers and the rabbit hole to far right conspiracies.
posted by Kitteh to MetaFilter on May 3 at 7:24 AM
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[more posts]

You couldn’t do that joke today because it’s a business model for at least five start ups. [view]
posted by Artw to MetaFilter on Apr 30 at 9:19 AM
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Maybe I have a different perspective because I used to go to live theatre a lot, but colour blind casting has long been a thing there. So I tend to interpret it the same way in TV and movies. In Renegade Nell I just kind of assumed the Earl of Poynton is a white character who happens to be played by a black man. Just suspend your disbelief.... [more]
posted by TheophileEscargot to MetaFilter on Apr 30 at 12:39 PM
95 users marked this as a favorite

. Paul Auster had a real profound effect on me. I knew of him early, because my dad really liked his works. Sometime in the early 90s, my dad interviewed him for Icelandic radio, and Auster said he should be in touch when he was in New York. My dad didn’t really think much of it, but once when he was headed to New York for a conference, he sent... [more]
posted by Kattullus to MetaFilter on May 1 at 2:15 PM
86 users marked this as a favorite

The 'trad wives' I knew growing up in the 60s/70s wore polyester elastic-waisted pants around the house and only put on lipstick for (maybe) church. They did not coo about how they loved serving their husbands; their expressed emotions about their spouses ranged from mild annoyance to contempt to fear. Kids were just tossed outside and ignored as... [more]
posted by LindsayIrene to MetaFilter on May 3 at 8:34 AM
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It's pure bullshit. [view]
posted by ovvl to MetaFilter on May 2 at 8:27 PM
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Seen on Blue Sky: "Interesting how Julia Louis-Dreyfus is way too busy having an actual post-Seinfeld career to complain about woke." [view]
posted by Kitteh to MetaFilter on Apr 30 at 9:30 AM
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A more skeptical look at the Leininger case. [view]
posted by interogative mood to MetaFilter on May 2 at 8:13 PM
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yes it is and it's binding both ways if you stop eating the shrimp you have breached the contract. [view]
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements to MetaFilter on May 3 at 8:30 AM
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“If you draw a doughnut around that Circuit City,” a Charlotte police captain later said, “I bet he talked to everyone within a mile.” I'm sorry, what? A doughnut? That's what we're drawing? [view]
posted by charismatic megafauna to MetaFilter on Apr 30 at 3:20 PM
70 users marked this as a favorite

Ctrl-F p-r-i-v-a-t-e e-q-u-i-t-y Found the problem. Put the corpse over there next to Toys 'Я' Us, Bed Bath and Beyond, Sears, RadioShack, etc. [view]
posted by JoeZydeco to MetaFilter on May 3 at 7:50 AM
67 users marked this as a favorite

Unless you can get an HP LaserJet 4+. I killed a man by throwing one out a seventh story window and then used it to print out his death certificate. [view]
posted by charred husk to MetaFilter on May 5 at 12:03 PM
62 users marked this as a favorite

While I think Seinfeld is very very wrong, and super super myopic, that doesn't make him a "horrible horrible person." No, what makes him a horrible, horrible person was dating a high school student when he was 38. [view]
posted by rikschell to MetaFilter on Apr 30 at 9:13 AM
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Ten months ago when the Supreme Court rejected a loan forgiveness plan for technicalities, Biden quickly revised it and announced $39 billion in student debt relief. But you didn't hear too many people credit him for it, because it's difficult for them to admit how successful Biden is as a leftist president. [view]
posted by The Pluto Gangsta to MetaFilter on May 1 at 6:08 PM
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To raise enough cash to make the deal happen, Golden Gate sold off Red Lobster's real estate to another entity — in this case, a company called American Realty Capital Properties — and then immediately leased the restaurants back. Yep, that’ll do it every time. We’re only hearing about all you can eat because shoplifting doesn’t... [more]
posted by Artw to MetaFilter on May 3 at 8:06 AM
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It's got to be hard to feel like you're the king of comedy and then one day and wake up and realize that you're not as funny as dril. [view]
posted by phooky to MetaFilter on Apr 30 at 9:08 AM
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Disruption by laying off faculty and closing programs: A-ok! Disruption by having a small tent encampment in the quad: Send in the goons! [view]
posted by Dip Flash to MetaFilter on May 6 at 4:03 PM
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Endless shrimp didn't sink the seafood chain. Wall Street did. (Business Insider) [view]
posted by box to MetaFilter on May 3 at 7:49 AM
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I'm honestly starting to think none of these guys care about cultivating the buddha nature. [view]
posted by The Manwich Horror to MetaFilter on May 5 at 8:37 AM
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Red Lobster misjudged just how many seafood lovers would pour into restaurants around the United States and fill up their stomachs with pounds of sweet, juicy crab legs drenched in lemon and dipped in melted butter. Did a Red Lobster marketing team write this article? [view]
posted by moonmilk to MetaFilter on May 3 at 7:45 AM
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Apparently, Shakespeare did not put all his Basques in one exeunt. [view]
posted by Ishbadiddle to MetaFilter on May 4 at 4:35 AM
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[more comments]