how did I miss this?

This morning kicked off in an excellent way when I absent-mindedly glanced up at T, mind still on the Last Podcast on the Left episode I'd been listening to while emptying the dishwasher, and said, "Hey, do you remember Mark Twitchell?"

( You know, the dude on the Edmonton cosplay scene who killed a man in 2008 in part because he thought he could be like Dexter, but cooler? )

We also got to talking about surrealism and shitposting, especially in the context of the fandom of yesteryear, and on balance--I don't think Tumblr fandom is actually any more clearly fascinated with surreal humor than media fandom on the old LJ/DW circles, either. T kept pointing out Heero Is Not Toast, which is something that wouldn't be out of place in any Tumblr reblog chain (although the Relena-killing thing would be now, thank fuck). I kept thinking about things like wingfic or some of the weirder crackfic premises I saw c. 2006ish. Seriously, what the hell was with wingfic? It's easily as weird as anything SuperWhoLock came up with, and it just appeared everywhere--like A/B/O, actually, but less explicably.

wednesday linkspam

muccamukk hosted a discussion about opt-in versus opt-out linking, and the ethics of linking in light of the knock-on effects of your readers and what they choose to do.

lannamichaels found out that a Vienna Teng song is about politics, which makes total sense in the context of the lyrics but is not something I would have guessed. I love "Stray Italian Greyhound" to pieces, and knowing this thing just makes me love it more.

For as little as $29, this company promises to "brainwash" an individual person on Facebook. Whether or not the startup in question can effectively pull this off--and neither the author nor I am convinced--this is a really creepy fucking thing to see, and a good nudge to me to turn my adblockers back on. (Fuck, it's hard--I want to give certain places the benefit of the doubt and revenue, but at the same time, I don't like to be manipulated. The internet is very, very bad at working out what I might like, so I hope it's working.)

This piece on what it's like to be an internet advice columnist is pretty hilarious.

So is this list of "unparliamentary language" that NZ politicians have gotten penalized for using. And there's a Canadian edition here, too.

Still giggling at weird Puritan names, okay. Has-Descendants! Tace! Wrestling!

This Maia Szalavitz piece on media coverage of opiods is excellent. I really like her writing generally.

Remember when feral emus roamed Texas?

This reflection on the creation of the bisexual pride flag gave me a lot of feelings.

Man injects 18 doses of semen into arm to cure back pain. Spoiler: did not work.

Via kabarett: To unlock the brain's mysteries, puree it. Still working out what I think of this one. I work on enough brains to think that cell counting is probably not the best way to go about what we're doing, but most of her conclusions support and inform certain other aspects of comparative neuroanatomy (e.g. the importance of cortical volume, at least for mammals). I notice that the article doesn't mention a thing I would think is completely essential to understanding the findings it mentions in birds, which is that birds don't have a cortex as we understand it--that's a mammals thing. Birds do have an older analogous structure, but their brains are organized a little differently, and they do not rely on cortical surface area to get things done as mammals do. It's really interesting in that vein that bird brains are so much denser in terms of neurons.

I have to wonder how important the specifically cortical structures are outside of a mammalian context, that's all. (I brought it to Metafilter, where a few other neuroscientists weighed in.)