Kill some time today with a Shorpy image search for Catonsvile.
I find this interesting because Jen and I had a cicada-themed wedding back in 2004: A Century of Cicadas is the NY Times’ interactive feature outlining the appearance of each brood all the way back to 1893. Apparently our wedding guests were Brood X, while our impending guests will be Brood II.
File this under helpful to have: Let’s Do Drum Brakes, Part One. I certainly need a refresher course.
Here’s a great little article about Old School Dungeons & Dragons and the changes made after it was bought out by Wizards of the Coast.
Child psychologist Donald Winncott describes the pure play of youth, where an unboundedness is the required work of a healthy developing mind, and continues to be an vital part of being an authentic self into adulthood. Is this was role-playing is about? Authenticity? And is someone supposed to find authenticity imagining they are, say, a magic-user in search of arcane lore?
A visual representation of musical styles and artists, example 47: Every Noise at Once.
This site reminds me of the original Fucked Company back in the day: pure, unbridled snark, set afaire with the power of a thousand blazing suns. Good times.
Iconic Photos is just as it says on the label: Famous, Infamous and Iconic Photos from history. There’s hours of fascinating reading there.
Ooooh, you tease. Boards Of Canada have mysteriously released several vinyl albums via Record Store Day, and there is still speculation as to what they are, if they’re all the same, or what they even mean.
Dash cams are huge in Russia, where insurance fraud is rampant and terrible drivers are common. I’m driving through the west side of Baltimore every day, which resembles Russia in many respects. This gets filed under “Nice to have when we have some more money: dashcamtalk.com reviews and compares most of the major models out there right now.
From Ars Technica: How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 “moon rocket” engine back to life.
Each F-1 engine was uniquely built by hand, and each has its own undocumented quirks. In addition, the design process used in the 1960s was necessarily iterative: engineers would design a component, fabricate it, test it, and see how it performed. Then they would modify the design, build the new version, and test it again. This would continue until the design was “good enough.”