I got my first Kíla album in the mid-1990s while I was going to university in Halifax, Canada. It was a big deal.

Lemme give you some background: my folks declared bankruptcy the week that I shipped off to school. The financial help I assumed would be there for me, wasn't. I watched, near penniless, as my fellows drank themselves into oblivion and got to know one another. I couldn't afford to participate. I couldn't afford the books from the extensive reading list I'd been given. The only thing that I had going for me was that I'd used my student loan to pay for a meal plan as part of my first semester's tuition. I quickly found the work I needed to get by, teaching music, doing audio/visual duty for the classes I was attending, rattling locks as a security guard and playing in a bar band to make ends meet. I was exhausted much of the time.

There wasn't a lot of room in my life for joy back then.

Around the middle of the school year, I received a letter from my mother. It explained that the she'd come by a coupon, good for $25 at HMV--a Canadian and British music store franchise. The thought of buying new music--new anything, really--at the time, didn't have a place in my head, given how hard it was to come by books or cover my day-to-day expenses. I've never listened to a lot of popular music. My tastes lean towards OG punk and Irish/Scots traditional music. Read the rest

Mama was 59 years old, the oldest among the Royal Burgers Zoo chimpanzee colony in Arnhem.

Jan van Hooff (emeritus professor behavioural biology at Utrecht University and co-founder of the Burgers colony) who has known Mama since 1972, visited her in the week before she died of old age in april 2016. It took a while before she became aware of Jan's presence. Her reaction was extremely emotional and heart-breaking. Mama played an important social role in the colony. This has been described in "Chimpanzee Politics" by Frans de Waal, who studied the colony since 1974.

Visit before the end comes, and stay close enough to know when it's coming. Read the rest

She said, "I bet I do as good as you" Read the rest

Iggy Pop's beloved cockatoo Biggy Pop has his own Instagram account, where he and his famous owner seem to be best friends: Read the rest

Andrew Hussie's Homestuck was a vast, sprawling, impenetrable, hostile webcomic, and it only become harder to define as its popularity grew and its volume stretched toward a million words...

If you ask a fan, you get a flood of enthusiastic nonsense: It’s… well, it’s a webcomic, but sometimes it’s more like an old-school text-based roleplaying game. It’s about a group of kids who are playing that game, and also cause the end of the world…. It’s about growing up, but there’s also time travel, and of course we can’t forget about the alien trolls! and there’s like, complex four-dimensional romance! and really touching moments, and surreal humor, and so many callbacks, self-references, and running jokes I don’t know what it’s even about except for itself, I mean, the author appears as a character, and then gets killed, and the fourth wall isn’t just broken: fourth walls are a tool used by the characters to travel from the… well, see there are lots of universes, and dream universes-

What it was, writes Ben Tolkin, was the first true work of internet art. Participation in the vast, sprawling, impenetrable, hostile subculture around it was an integral part of the storytelling experience.

Homestuck is the first media directed at people for whom the Internet is a way of life, the constantly connected, information-rich community, rather than the individual viewer. Homestuck may not have been written by all of us, but it was written for all of us; since its beginnings as a forum game, Hussie’s writing can only be read by a team constantly supplying each other with knowledge.

Read the rest

John and Julie Gottman are a husband and wife psychologist team who run a hugely successful couples therapy practice that encompasses books, seminars, research, and one-on-one sessions. In a massive, engaging essay, Eve Fairbanks describes how their love inspired their work, and what she learned when she followed their teaching. Read the rest

Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is a game about love, about cooperation, and possibly about what it means to save a relationship that's falling apart.

Dane Grant and Dayna Porter met on-set.

Kate MacDowell's Entangled is a beautiful, tentacly porcelain sculpture depicting two hearts whose questing tentacles have entwined. (via JWZ) Read the rest

"It's all true folks. All you need is love." (Blank on Blank) Read the rest

Via Public Domain Review: "The Open Country of Woman’s Heart, Exhibiting its internal communications, and the facilities and dangers to Travellers therein” (1830s), by D.W. Kellog. Read the rest

"The password to unlocking the secrets of the heart… is Swordfish."

At Twitter, Ben Lillie has been collecting Science Sparks — the first experiences with science or some science-related thing that made people connect emotionally with nature, space, math, and wonder. He's collected them into a Storify that's worth reading, especially if (like me) you're thinking about ways to get kids engaged with science. My Science Spark: It's a toss-up between the epic multi-habitat diorama at the University of Kansas' Dyche Museum of Natural History (a place I visited so frequently as a child that I almost feel more of a connection to it than to any house I lived in) and the adorably illustrated adventures of Louis Pasteur and Marie Curie from the ValueTales book series. Read the rest

Back in 2002, psychologists studying how couples argued found four different behaviors that correlated strongly with future divorce. In fact, in a small sample of 80 couples, the combination of those behaviors could be used to predict who would divorce over the next 14 years with 93% accuracy. The good news: While these behaviors are all things that people probably do sometimes, it's the frequency of behaviors that matters ... and, better yet, they're all things that you can change. At PsySociety, Melanie Tannenbaum uses the amazingly spot-on example of Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries to illustrate how unhealthy arguments can lead to relationship collapse. Read the rest

Quinn Norton, who was Aaron Swartz's lover, remembers him:

We used to have a fight about how much the internet would grieve if he died. I was right, but the last word you get in as the still living is a hollow thing, trailing off, as it does, into oblivion. I love Aaron. I loved Aaron. There are no words to can contain love, to cloth it in words is to kill it, to mummify it and hope that somewhere in the heart of a reader, they have the strength and the magic to resurrect it. I can only say I love him. That I will always love him, and that I known for years I would. Aaron was a boy, not big, who cast a shadow across the world. But for me, he will always be that person who made me love him. He was so frustrating, and we fought. But we fought like what we were: two difficult people who couldn’t escape loving each other.

My Aaron Swartz, whom I loved. Read the rest

While you were eating Thanksgiving turkey, surrounded by loving family and friends, one whale was all alone, swimming through the Pacific Ocean with no one to talk to and no one to care.

Since 1989, researchers have been tracking this specific whale based on its distinct vocalizations. Baleen whales — a category of cetaceans without teeth, separate from their toothy dolphin/beluga/orca relations — are famous for producing eerie, underwater songs and scientists think those sounds are probably an extremely important aspect of participation in whale society. Baleen whales lack keen eyesight and sense of smell underwater, so sounds are probably how they recognize one another, help each other navigate, and even find mates. But these vocalizations happen in very specific frequency range — between 10 and 31 hertz, depending on the species. The Christmas Whale, on the other hand, speaks at 52 hertz. Imagine brining a piccolo to a tuba party. That is analogous to the awkward position that the 52-hertz whale is in.

Scientists usually pick up the call of the 52-hertz whale sometime between August and December, as it makes its way through a Cold War-era network of underwater microphones in the North Pacific. Although this whale has apparently survived for many years and seems to have grown and matured during that time (based on its voice deepening slightly), it also appears to exist outside of whale social systems. It travels alone. Nobody answers its high-pitched pleas for love. Every so often, non-scientist humans remember that it exists and write sad stories about it. Read the rest

A woman was charged Wednesday with disturbing the peace of the dead after authorities found a full skeleton, a skull and a CD-ROM titled "My necrophilia" in a box in her home. [Reuters] Read the rest