The Bitter Taste of Dying

Fourteen years old is far too young to find out what death tastes like, but I remember it. Vividly. In case you’re wondering, it tastes bitter — although when giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a dying man whose body’s last gasp is foaming at the mouth, it’s hard to differentiate between the taste and the smell and the visual. It, like the memory, just sort of all blends together. Regardless, it was far too young. I was far too young. Remember when they told us that a brain on drugs looks like a frying egg? I can tell you first hand, that’s not what it looks like. It’s far more disturbing than that. It’s much more grotesque.

-Medium

The BBC Halloween Hoax That Traumatized Viewers

After more than 20,000 phone calls, one induced labor, and thousands of angry letters, the UK's Broadcasting Standards Council convened for a hearing. On June 27, 1995, they ruled that the producers of Ghostwatch, a BBC program that aired on Halloween night less than three years earlier, had deliberately set out to “cultivate a sense of menace.” Put another way, the BBC had been found to be complicit in scaring 11 million people senseless.

-mental_floss

Les clowns «trash» - La liberté d’expression (16 ans +)

Ça manquait à ma culture. Je ne le dis ni ironiquement ni au second degré ; il faut avoir vu l’humoriste Mike Ward et sa bande de clowns trash une fois dans sa vie pour mesurer le vide abyssal dans lequel s’enfonce l’Amérique du tout-est-permis. Rassurons-nous, les trumpistes ont des cousins germains chez nous, mais sans permis de port d’armes.

-Le Devoir

Asylum: Inside The Ruins Of America’s Vast Mental Hospitals

Christopher Payne takes us back to when mental illness was even less understood than it is today in his pictures of former asylums taken between 2002 and 2008. These vast architectural relics cast sinister shadows on the modern human psyche. That was then, we tell ourselves. And it as awful. But an asylum is a refuge. It offers sanctuary and a safe place to be different. The Oxford English Dictionary says an asylum is “a benevolent institution according shelter and support to some class of the afflicted, the unfortunate, or destitute.” Payne’s pictures show us the afterlife of once thriving buildings, vital and hulking parts of America’s mental health industry.

-Flashbak

ADVERTISEMENPayne’s pictures show us the afterlife of once thriving buildings, vital and hulking parts of America’s mental health industry.

ADVERTISEMENTPayne’s pictures show us the afterlife of once thriving buildings, vital and hulking parts of America’s mental health industry.

How Facial Recognition Software Is Changing the Porn Industry

There are a couple of reliable rules regarding pornography. First, any new technology will almost instantly be put to service in the pursuit of masturbation. Is there any doubt that roughly 30 seconds after the release of Snapchat's video Spectacles, for example, some enterprising onanist will slap them on with his pants down?And then there's Rule 34: If you can imagine it, there is a porn version of it. Of course, we still have the greatest porn site ever devised—the mind. Still, as many people are accustomed to viewing pornography online, calling up a mental image of your amorous intent won't cut it. To bridge the gap, mouth-breathers on Reddit have forums dedicated to helping people find professional porn performers that resemble people from their real lives. One step further is a new offering from the massive Belgian-based sex-cam company megacams.me, which is using facial recognition software to search through its database of tens of thousands of live sex performers to find one that resembles a photo you upload.

-Esquire

A Hellenistic Eden: One Ancient King’s Attempt to Create the Perfect City on Earth

Sixteen hundred years before Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia, describing a near-ideal society, a Hellenistic king attempted to create his own real-life paradise. The monarch? Aristonicus, also known as Eumenes III, Roman-supported ruler of the city of Pergamum/Pergamon in Asia Minor. The utopia he wanted to build? Heliopolis (meaning “Sun City” in Greek).

-Ancient Origins

Living in an Unreal World, by Adam Curtis

We live in a time of great uncertainty and confusion. Events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of control. Donald Trump, Brexit, the War in Syria, the endless migrant crisis, random bomb attacks. And those who are supposed to be in power are paralysed - they have no idea what to do.

This film is the epic story of how we got to this strange place. It explains not only why these chaotic events are happening - but also why we, and our politicians, cannot understand them.

It shows that what has happened is that all of us in the West - not just the politicians and the journalists and the experts, but we ourselves - have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world. But because it is all around us we accept it as normal.

But there is another world outside. Forces that politicians tried to forget and bury forty years ago - that then festered and mutated - but which are now turning on us with a vengeful fury. Piercing though the wall of our fake world.

-BBC

Black Mirror's third season opens with a vicious take on social media

The third season of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, a Twilight Zone-esque anthology TV series about technological anxieties and possible futures, was released on Netflix on October 21st. In this series, six writers will look at each of the third season’s six episodes to see what they have to say about current culture and projected fears. If Black Mirror could be summed up in one sentence, it'd probably be "Technology is exciting, but people are awful, and they keep finding the worst ways to apply it."

-The Verge

L’ambition donne du sens à l’existence

« Lorsqu’on aborde la question de l’ambition, vient spontanément à l’esprit l’ambition sociale, souligne Sophie Cadalen, psychanalyste et auteure notamment de La belle ambition (JC Lattès, 2013) et de Vivre ses désirs, vite ! (Philippe Rey, 2016). Mais l’ambition, commune à tous les individus, c’est aussi – et avant tout – celle du sens donné à l’existence : à quoi employer son passage sur Terre et comment en tirer le meilleur parti. »


-Le Monde

Les love dolls, ces sextoys doués d’une âme

Entretien avec Agnès Giard, qui a enquêté dix ans sur les love dolls, ces poupées de silicone venues du Japon qui servent à la fois de sextoys, de compagnes et de miroirs à fantasmes.

-Rue89

La Bella Italia – Beautiful Abandoned Italy

Abandoned places always attract researchers for its unique aura. Belgian photographer Kenneth Provost is one of them. From his trip to Italy, he brought not hackneyed photos of the Colosseum and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but the mysterious photos of abandoned places with the title “Beautiful Italy” – “La Bella Italia“.

-Leenks

The perfect Route 66 road trip for the Main Street of America's 90th birthday

I finished the 2,448-mile drive before I had even started it.
“End” read the Route 66 sign on Jackson Boulevard in downtown Chicago.
I circled the block — a second attempt. Gobs of tourists, double-parked cars, dogs on retractable leashes and kids glued to their gadgets streamed in and out of view. Amid the chaos, I searched for a plain brown square, an arrow pointing west. “Begin” read the Route 66 sign on Adams Street.I bounced in my car seat and did as I was told: I began.

-Washington Post

The Illustrated Map of America's Worst Utopias - The road to weird food communes and sex cults is paved with good intentions.

There are many who want to believe that a utopia—a perfect society, an ideal world—can exist. Even in America. Yet, as quickly as leaders eagerly build utopias, they often crumble in a glorious heaping mess. Some fall to sex scandals, others toil in hunger, while many are struck with bad luck. From nudist colonies to bioterrorist cults, we map and explore six of the most disappointing and unfortunate utopias in the United States.

-Atlas Obscura

14 Behind-the-Scenes Secrets of NYC Taxi Drivers

More than 50,000 yellow taxi drivers navigate New York City’s streets each year, carrying residents, workers, and tourists from one destination to another. Each car will log up to 70,000 miles a year on the job [PDF]. Needless to say, the city’s taxi drivers have seen it all and then some.

To get a better idea of what their job entails, mental_floss asked 40-year veteran driver and author Eugene Salomon (Confessions of a New York Taxi Driver) to give us a glimpse of life on the other side of the partition. Here’s what he had to say about the tips, the tipsy, and why he sometimes has to call your mom.

-mental_floss

A Child’s Guide to Squatting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

In E.L. Konigsburg’s 1967 children’s classic From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, siblings Claudia and James Kincaid run away from their cushy suburban home in Greenwich, Connecticut, and camp out at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Their adventure in luxury squatting lasts for three days, during which they do all the illegal things that most museum visitors only fantasize about, like lounging in Marie Antoinette’s lounge chair, bathing in the Fountain of the Muses, and using Roman sarcophagi as personal storage units.

-Hyperallergic

Historic Facts That Are A Little Below the Belt (20 pics)

Historic facts.

-Leenks

Candy and Poison - The night-life denizens of Parker Day’s portrait series “Icons.”

Parker Day grew up hanging around her father’s comic-book shop, in San Jose. There were certain shelves, the ones with explicit comics by the likes of R. Crumb, that she was not allowed to browse, so she would dream up her own stories inspired by the covers of the forbidden works. More recently, after returning to photography—a subject she studied in school but gave up when she became a hairdresser and then a night-life promoter—she fell into a similar habit. Searching social media for strangers she might be interested in photographing, she would find a subject—a goth or a drag queen, say—and start to spin stories about what might be beneath the person’s surface.

-The New Yorker

Fruit & Veggy Crate Labels

Fruit crate labels were a frequent means of marketing fruit packer brands at the turn of the century. Fruit crates with the labels attached would be displayed at farmer markets across the United States. All of our Fruit Crate Labels are reproduced on museum-quality, archival papers suitable for framing and display in any home or office.

-Vintagraph

A Brief Compendium of Abandoned Roads to Nowhere

This post doesn’t require much introduction, only a question. Why is the abandoned road always the most tempting one to take? I found an awesome Flickr group dedicated entirely to disused roads, so let’s take a drive down memory lane…

-Messy Nessy Chic