#really interesting article

[chirp-chirp-hockey]

Unmasked: Goalies able to break in new Olympic gear quicker than ever | NHL.com

Thinner, stiffer pads in players' national team colors nearly game-ready right out of box

Interesting article with quotes from Merzlikins, Hellebuyck, Lankinen, and the King himself.

[auroraluciferi]

Russia’s ethnic minorities lament the war in Ukraine

Ethnic minority troops are said to be dying in greater numbers than their Slav compatriots in the so-called ‘special military operation'

According to open source researchers, soldiers with roots in poorer regions such as Buryatia and Dagestan are disproportionately represented among Russian casualties in Ukraine.

“Most of the soldiers and officers of the ground forces and the airborne forces come from poor Russian towns and villages,” military specialist Pavel Luzin told Al Jazeera.

“This social-economic stratification has a long-term tradition in the Russian armed forces because young men from the cities with relatively good education serve in other military branches … but the infantry consists of badly-educated soldiers from poor families and regions.”

Buryatia, in Siberia, was once a part of Mongolia that was conquered by Cossacks in the 17th century.

“We can’t determine our own politics – if we had a real federation, the head of our republic could say no, Buryats won’t fight in this criminal war. But he keeps providing cannon fodder for Putin,” Victoria Maladaeva, of the Free Buryatia Foundation, told Al Jazeera.

“Buryatia, like the other ethnic republics, is governed by the colonial policies of Moscow,” Maladaeva continued.

“Our languages and history are disappearing off the face of the Earth, while Moscow sucks all the money and resources out of the provinces. Moscow is a beautiful city but it’s such a facade of all of Russia, because if you go just a little further, the houses are falling apart, there are no roads, there’s no work.”

[notesonartistry]

In Swift’s evolving songwriting, about other people or herself, the events may be outside our experience, but they can be just as heartfelt through the deft use of language. And in this, we may come to understand just what Taylor Swift’s words are worth.

JSTOR Daily, The Linguistic Evolution of Taylor Swift  

[toxicsky]

by William Gibbons

Abstract

The science-fiction world of the video game Bioshock (2K Games, 2007) presents a dystopian vision of mid-century America. The game explores the creation and ultimate destruction of the underwater city of Rapture, an Ayn-Rand-inspired capitalist Utopia. Though the game features an award-winning original score, its soundtrack also borrows extensively from the popular music of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, including tracks by The Inkspots, Django Reinhardt, and Noël Coward, among numerous others. On one level, this borrowed music signifies the time period evoked by the game, grounding the action in the mid-century despite the presence of futuristic technology, acting as a constant reminder of the aesthetic and cultural values of the predystopian American culture, creating a dichotomy between its optimism and the dystopian environment of Bioshock. This juxtaposition renders the songs deeply ironic, and highlights the tragedy of the grim "reality" that the protagonist experiences. More significantly, atypically for games, the music is allowed to assume a crucial narrative function. The careful selection of songs frequently allows the lyrics to be "misread" as commenting on the game's action in the manner of a voiceover, spurring players to reflection without removing them from control.

[itsplurb1ntime]

How Jodie Comer focused the fury

What unites the Scouse chameleon’s long-awaited zombie sequel and a Tony-award-winning one-woman play about the legal system? As it turns ou

[afieldinengland]

Meet ‘Whitby woman’: she may swing Labour’s vote

North Yorkshire town represents a disproportionate chunk of women nationally – in their 60s, homeowners, pro-Brexit, no degree – who are und

[zot3-flopped]

Life After Food?

A diabetes miracle drug has become an off-label appetite suppressant, changing the definition of being thin and what it takes to get there.

Although it’s been approved and prescribed since 2017, the buy-in of Hollywood, openly or not, took Ozempic from medicine to status symbol. The message that dramatic weight loss is now readily, effortlessly available for those who can afford it spread across text chains and friend groups along with referrals to willing prescribers. Not since Botox, and before that Viagra, has a drug brand become so well known so quickly.

Dr. Paul Jarrod Frank, a New York dermatologist, first identified “Ozempic face,” meaning the aging effects sudden weight loss can have.

[towlerknows]

This magician escaped slavery by mailing himself to freedom

When, in 1849, a man named Henry Brown escaped slavery in a box, America wondered: Could abolition be delivered by mail?

A national postal service has been part of the fabric of America since the Constitution was ratified in 1789. But from the beginning, “Southern political interests always kept a close eye on U.S. mail policy,” Robbins wrote in “Fugitive Mail.” It wasn’t hard to see the mail’s power to threaten the South’s economic system.

Early on, enslaved Africans had been used to deliver mail, but a rebellion led by enslaved people in the Caribbean sowed fear in the southern United States. In 1802, Postmaster General Gideon Granger laid out these concerns in a letter to a Georgia senator:

“The most active and intelligent [slaves] are employed as post riders…By traveling from day to day, and hourly mixing with people…they will acquire information. They will learn that a man’s rights do not depend on his color. They will, in time, become teachers to their brethren…One able man among them, perceiving the value of this machine, might lay a plan which would be communicated by your post riders from town to town and produce a general and united operation against you.”

That spring, Congress banned enslaved people from delivering the mail.

It’s not unlike today, Heidelbaugh adds, with conversations tackling access to social media, news, the internet, and how free speech should be regulated.

“The mail,” she says, “is very political.”