kate_nepveu | Thursday links are waiting for the car inspection to be done

This troll sculpture looks like something out of Fullmetal Alchemist.
Article at the NY Times about a really cool-sounding contemporary sculpture exhibit called “Phenomenal Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee” at the Met Breuer.
The Huffpost on millennial nuns.
I am so excited to have time to read This Is How You Lose the Time War, and this Big Idea piece by the co-authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is just achingly beautiful.
Comparison of "Hakuna Makata" in both the original and rebooted Lion King.
At Black Nerd Problems, I really enjoyed this riff on a barbershop at a convention.
Sadly the original tweeter is now a locked account, archive.org won't play the embedded videos, and I can't figure out the right keywords to find a working video; but via that thread I found this immensely satisfying video of solving a more complex rope puzzle via topology.
I greatly respect Stephen Colbert for going all-out singing "This Year" with the Mountain Goats, but I agree with Chad that the Craig Finn version is better because the crowd is into it. This song always makes me think of the power of specificity to evoke universal emotional responses; I've never done any of the things that the narrator has but that's what makes the song work.

(I also agree with the AV Club that "there’s no greater pleasure than to belt out the band’s apocalyptic 'No Children'—'I hope you die! I hope we both die!'")
I think the NY Times' Op-Eds from the Future are likely to be a good candidate for Best Related Work for next year's Hugos.
The 2019 Audubon Photography Awards: Winners and the Top 100. I love both the pictures and the stories behind taking the pictures.
I am completely unsurprised that sleep trackers can make your sleep worse; and I liked this profile of the main voice for the app Calm, which is my meditation app of choice (though I used to fall asleep to Stephen Fry's (free) story, and now I mostly use a particular music track). (There is a small-ish amount of free content, enough to try it out.)
Deadspin's story, What a Foul Ball Can Do, is haunting. (Content note: death and serious physical injury.)
erik_kaars on medieval snail ecology and society, and a blog post on Why Are There So Many Snails In Medieval Manuscripts?.
mickmercury has some recs for podcast listeners who are burnt out on horror & sad plot stuff. The only one of these I have listened to is the Beef and Dairy Network, which I paused in listening to because it was leaning a bit too hard into horror, but until then I was finding it delightfully bizarre.
I always love a good rant about bad pop-culture archery; this one is about video games.