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[ more inside ] posted by Fiasco da Gama at 9:58 PM - 9 comments SPIDERQUEST Quest for the Man-Sized Spider Jenny Nicholson goes on a road trip to find an extremely large spider. posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 7:10 PM - 11 comments Our power as players comes from being together As the fall college football season barrels ever closer despite COVID, SEC officials told players in a private phone call this week, “There are going to be outbreaks. We’re going to have positive cases on every single team in the SEC. That’s a given. And we can’t prevent it ( wapo ).” Meanwhile, players at the Pac12 stand united in a series of demands to protect and benefit both scholarship and walk-on athletes addressing concerns related to COVID, economic freedom, medical care, and racism, among other things, and plan to sit out the season until demands are met . [ more inside ] posted by ChuraChura at 4:54 PM - 15 comments "The Singing Selfie" Each month, Islington Folk Club here in North London eases the boredom of lockdown by holding a competition called Trad2Mad , inviting its members and friends to post YouTube performances of themselves singing, unaccompanied, a traditional folk song, a modern pop song you might never have expected to hear in that style, or any other damn thing they feel like contributing. A shortlist is them produced, votes gathered and a winner selected. There were a few entries I really liked this month, which you'll find direct links to below. [ more inside ] posted by Paul Slade at 3:24 PM - 1 comment "Writers, Musicians, and Music fans on one album that changed them." Hanif Abdurraquib's ongoing "playlist project" SIXTY EIGHT 2 OH FIVE includes year-by-year playlists and links to live performances from 1968 to 2005, and essays from friends "about a single album that turned their world upside down." Essays to date: "2005: Keyshia Cole, The Way It Is," by Nabila Lovelace; "1976: Bob Dylan, Desire," by Matt Mitchell; "1993: Janet Jackson, Janet" , by Aricka Foreman; "1969: Johnny Cash, At San Quentin," by Adia Victoria; "2000: Jill Scott, Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Vol. 1," by Tomás Miriti Pacheco; and "1997: Radiohead, OK Computer," by Vivian Lee; "1991: Pearl Jam, Ten," by Nicholas Russell. [ more inside ] posted by mandolin conspiracy at 2:35 PM - 3 comments A Complicated History of Han Chinese Anti-Blackness A Complicated History of Han Chinese Anti-Blackness. (Medium) Frankie Huang reflects on the relationship between Han chauvinism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness. Previously, Eileen Huang (no relationship) calls out the Asian-American community to reflect on the contributions of Black activists to Asian-American civil rights. [ more inside ] posted by schroedinger at 1:27 PM - 9 comments How a Cheese Goes Extinct How a Cheese Goes Extinct Ruby Tandoh writes about the culture, history and anthropology of cheesemaking through the lens of the British artisanal cheese industry. "When you talk with cheese aficionados, it doesn’t usually take long for the conversation to veer this way: away from curds, whey, and mold, and toward matters of life and death. With the zeal of nineteenth-century naturalists, they discuss great lineages and endangered species, painstakingly cataloguing those cheeses that are thriving and those that are lost to history." posted by simonw at 11:57 AM - 20 comments 2020 GLAAD Media Award Winners Here Are All the Winners From the 2020 GLAAD Media Awards [Billboard link] Full list and links below the fold. [ more inside ] posted by hippybear at 7:54 AM - 10 comments Read a Book with Kara Kara Brown is starting a new fiction book club. The first book of the month is Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston . [ more inside ] posted by toastyk at 7:38 AM - 5 comments "This is just people using big science words to sound magical" Randonautica claims to be a "quantumly generated Choose Your Own Adventure game" for smartphones. With over 10 million downloads and often false or exaggerated viral videos on TikTok and YouTube, the app has been criticised for saying it can read your thoughts (NYT). Daniel J. Rogers, a physicist who has worked with quantum random number generators, called Randonautica’s "mind-machine interaction" theory “completely absurd.” posted by adrianhon at 4:19 AM - 34 comments A blind and opaque reputelligent nosedive Data isn't just being collected from your phone. It's being used to score you. - "Operating in the shadows of the online marketplace, specialized tech companies you've likely never heard of are tapping vast troves of our personal data to generate secret 'surveillance scores' — digital mug shots of millions of Americans — that supposedly predict our future behavior. The firms sell their scoring services to major businesses across the U.S. economy. People with low scores can suffer harsh consequences."[ 1 ] [ more inside ] posted by kliuless at 2:46 AM - 25 comments August 1 The Hugo Awards for 2020 2020's Hugo Award winners were announced this weekend in a lengthy livestream available as a merciful edit . Full stats [PDF] break down votes on nominees discussed previously . Rebecca F. Kuang's acceptance speech for the newly-renamed Astounding Award movingly summarized issues in the field, and Jeannette Ng won a Hugo for her previous acceptance speech for the renamed award. Departed members of the community were memorialized in an annual list and in Neil Gaiman's acceptance speech . As for the presentation, Andrew Liptak says, " Last night's Hugo Awards ceremony was a mess ," and Natalie Luhrs says, " George R.R. Martin can fuck off into the sun ." SFWA President Mary Robinette Kowal: " This is a large systemic failure ." ConZealand's statement . GRRM's first comment and his second . John Scalzi on how to be a Hugo MC . Incidentally, the Retro Hugo results [PDF] presented a related issue for the eighth time . posted by Wobbuffet at 10:28 PM - 89 comments #CoCoVid #Cocovid is a online, interactive multiday event with live panels and other videos with members of the Youtube costuming community (known as CosTube). In normal times, this weekend would see costumers and cos players head to Costume College , a 3 day conference with classes and events for all aspects of costuming. Due to covid-19, the conference has been cancelled but the costuming and historical fashion community has come together to produce #CoCoVid . [ more inside ] posted by poxandplague at 4:42 PM - 3 comments 212-OPEC-SID In the pre-internet days, a notorious punk hotline was one of the few ways hardcore teens and metalheads could get up-to-the-minute information about upcoming shows in NYC and the surrounding suburbs. posted by pxe2000 at 9:57 AM - 15 comments harmony between precisely structured Kufic & exuberance of living matter In the Over the Shoulder series, London-based, French-Lebanese artist Joumana Medlej gives us glimpses into the exquisitely detailed process for "The Book of the Moon" and "Reverence for the Land" which "used pigments extracted from stones I picked up in Epping Forest and in Mount Lebanon so that it brings together the two lands I call home." Medlej's list of resources on Arabic calligraphy ...