February 6, 2014
"We Have Not Received A Valid Membership Login"
Just Ella. A short film from Jim Munroe, the creator of Ghosts With Shit Jobs, for the Lo-fi Sci-fi 48 Hour Film Challenge. "Just Ella posits a future overrun by gibbering monstrosities. Ella takes refuge in a 'the Ossington Safehouse, a collectively-run space dedicated to human sovereignty.' But despite doing the assigned tasks on the chore list, the Safehouse isn’t safe — the terrors outside are nothing compared to those within." [Via]
Nagasaki Mon Amour
Unedited footage of the bombing of Nagasaki: This silent film shows the final preparation and loading of the "Fat Man" bomb into "Bockscar," the plane which dropped the bomb on Nagasaki. It then shows the Nagasaki explosion from the window of an observation plane. This footage comes from Los Alamos National Laboratory. (SLYT)
Dibs!
You worked for 45 minutes with only one glove to dig your car out of the foot of snow it's parked in. Congratulations, you're dug out! But you're just driving to work and coming right back home again, and you know some lazy good-for-nuthin is gonna come along and cozy right up into your clean spot without even having to break a sweat. Not a problem for you, Bears fan! Behold the wintertime tradition of parking dibs, Chicago-style. [more inside]
If you’re a gay man, pose outdoors
Grumpy Disney: illustrations of Grumpy Cats as Disney Princesses
Eric Proctor, aka Tsaoshin, draws cute monsters, dragons, Disney characters and Grumpy Cats. The last two merge in a short series of images he calls Grumpy Disney, with the various Disney characters (mostly princesses) replaced with Grumpy Cats doing suitably Grumpy Cat things.
Cigarette TV Commercials
On January 2, 1971, the Public Health Cigarette Smoking
Act went into effect. In addition to adding a stronger health warning to cigarette packs, it banned
cigarette advertising on radio and TV in the United States. (MLYT) [more inside]
There were difficulties.
"This project started with my dad on Thanksgiving. He was reminiscing about Doug Williams, who in 1988 became the first black quarterback to start and win a Super Bowl. All these years later, he was still proud of Williams, whose name to some may be that of a half-remembered player from the past but to millions of others remains a powerful symbol of progress. It stayed with me, and it seemed that it was worth telling the story not just of Williams, but of everyone—of all those generations of players who struggled so that Russell Wilson could be, simply, a good young quarterback." Deadspin's The Big Book of Black Quarterbacks.
not flowers
*sniff* I'm getting some citrus...I'm getting some vodka...
Watch that space.
You should try slacklining. You could maybe try highlining. You should definitely not try the Balloon highline. [more inside]
Love for Sale
"Love for Sale" is a song by Cole Porter, from the musical The New Yorkers which opened on Broadway on December 8, 1930 and closed in May 1931. The song is written from the viewpoint of a prostitute advertising various kinds of "love for sale": "Old love, new love, every love but true love".
Originally considered in bad taste, even scandalous. In the initial Broadway production, it was performed by Kathryn Crawford, portraying a streetwalker. As a response to the criticism, the song was transferred from the white Crawford to the African American singer Elisabeth Welch. Despite the fact the song was banned from radio airplay, or perhaps because of it, it became a hit, with Libby Holman's version going to #5 and "Fred Waring's version (NSFW) going to #14, both in 1931.
Other notable recordings since include:
Frances Faye 1955, Billie Holiday 1956, Ella Fitzgerald 1956, Miles Davis 1959, Cannonball Adderley 1959, Eartha kitt 1965, Boney M. 1977, Elvis Costello 1981, Maude Maggart 2003, Jamie Cullum 2013 [more inside]
All players die after about 29,000 days.
When "Roses are red, violets are blue" just isn't going to cut it.
Not got a way with words? PayPal has made available a number of working poets to write custom poems for your love, just in time for Valentine's Day. [more inside]
Sochi is the Florida of Russia
The Sochi Project: An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus “Sochi used to be much prettier... These days crooks from Moscow come here to build and sell skyscrapers and apartments, although it used to be such a small, lovely town." via The New York Review of Books article on "Why Sochi"
Putin explicitly links the Games to the humiliations of the recent past: “There is also a certain moral aspect here and there is no need to be ashamed of it,” he said. “After the collapse of the Soviet Union, after the dark and, let us be honest, bloody events in the Caucasus, the society had a negative and pessimistic attitude.” The Olympics, he explains, are a necessary part of an effort to “strengthen the morale of the nation.”
A rare liberal acknowledgement of the failure of liberal race policies.
Part 1 of a series by Slate: "Resegregation is a misleading term because it implies that the left’s large-scale integrationist schemes were working, and would have continued to work, if not for the meddling of Republicans. But to believe that premise, you’d have to accept the assertion that the peak year for school integration happened 25 years ago. Does anyone remember the mid- to late-1980s as a flowering of adolescent racial harmony in America? I don’t. The truth is that the left has crafted a narrative about the death of Brown v. Board, a convenient one that serves its own ends. The reality is much more grim, and it starts in the place where Democrats drove the school bus into the ditch: Detroit."
Privatization of Justice: Probation for Profit
"Every year, US courts sentence several hundred thousand misdemeanor offenders to probation overseen by private companies that charge their fees directly to the probationers. Often, the poorest people wind up paying the most in fees over time, in what amounts to a discriminatory penalty. And when they can’t pay, companies can and do secure their arrest."
The Human Rights Watch releases a report on the for-profit probation industry in the US. The Atlantic weighs in.
The Human Rights Watch releases a report on the for-profit probation industry in the US. The Atlantic weighs in.
Hate Sinks
[W]e may not stop to think much about moderation as a form of labor that composes the Internet. But as the need to grant the audience “a voice” has become conventional wisdom, almost every media organization now needs this work done. [...] This complex tension—between voice and civility, eyeballs and deliberation—is one that future-of-news enthusiasts are good at waving away, but that comment moderators must bear. Within representative democracy, we can think of moderators’ bodies as being like that element of an electronic circuit that dissipates excess energy and allows it to function. They absorb the excess affects in a period of political dysfunction, and allow institutions to appear stable and unchallenged.Jason Wilson argues that, in the comments section, "the facade of liberal democracy only stays clean by putting young women [moderators] in hate’s way."
DevArt
DevArt: An exhibition of art created with code - skywriting quadcopter drones programmed with c++, room dividers reimagined as 3D screens for psychedelic projections, using raspberry pi to rename WiFi networks as lines of poetry. They are collaborating with the Barbican in London for the Digital Revolution exhibition and are currently seeking an emerging creative coder to be funded to present at the exhibition alongside world-class interactive artists Zach Lieberman, Karsten Schmidt, and the duo of Varvara Guljajeva & Mar Canet.
Full and Partial Belief
One HTML5 game per week
"As a developer and a gamer I always wanted to make games, but I never actually did it. To change that I threw myself a public challenge: build a new game every week in html5." [more inside]
I used to be like you, then I grew a brain, a dick, and a heart.
Every episode of Brad Neely's China, Il is currently available at adultswim.com.
Previously: 1,2,3. [more inside]
I can think of at least two things wrong with that description.
Called "Japan's Beethoven", composer Mamoru Samuragochi is known for his Hiroshima Symphony and various video games soundtracks, many of which were composed after he became deaf at age 35. But in a surprise confession this week, he revealed that a ghostwriter was actually responsible for his work over the last two decades. The ghostwriter, music teacher Takashi Niigaki, has revealed even more damning allegations.
Scotland is an unwon cause.
It is beginning to be appreciated, even in London, that Alex Salmond might just win his independence referendum in September. The break-up of Britain will have begun, David Cameron will have to contemplate being Prime Minister of a rump country — and HMS Britannia will be sunk, not with a bang but a whimper.
Fighting segregation in housing: There’s a map for that
A single mom, Nicole just completed a degree in early childhood development at the local community college. She has been patching together part-time work around her studies and Joe’s schedule. Until 2009, Nicole and Joe lived in a poor neighborhood in Baltimore. Now they’re in Columbia, Md., half an hour away by car, but a world away in terms of opportunity.
At Joe’s former elementary school in Baltimore, 97 percent of the students are low income, and 97 percent are African-American. His middle school in Columbia is one-third low income, with white, Asian, Hispanic and multiracial students making up just over half the population. In their old Baltimore neighborhood, Nicole says, she saw a man get shot in the leg in front of a corner bar as she held baby Joe in her arms.
ANIMAL FRIENDS
The Rocky Ridge Refuge is home to a lot of animals and a lot of interspecies friendship. [more inside]
Woodland Journeys of Self-Discovery
The next year would change his life forever, challenge him in ways he couldn’t imagine yet and unsettle an entire town. But his first leap was simple. On an unremarkable day in September 2012, after so many other frustrating and unremarkable days, he stepped into the woods carrying only a tarp and a hunting knife. He walked through the thickets and pines he’d fallen in love with as a child, and busied himself with the most worthwhile job he could think of: survival. Into The Pines.
Measure of a Man
2003 American Idol runner-up Clay Aiken is running for Congress in North Carolina. Aiken is a long-time political activist, and his campaign seems serious and sincere, as shown by the heartfelt five-minute video announcing his campaign. But the odds are against him in a district which voted for Romney by a twelve-point margin, and being a gay father is a possible liability in a state which recently voted to ban gay marriage.
(But of course, electing entertainers to political office is an American tradition.)
Olympic figure skating fashion
Figure skating competition begins today in Sochi and the costumes of the competitors are sure to generate interest. No longer homemade like some of Dorothy Hamill's costumes in the 1970s, these days even notable designers like Vera Wang create them.
Lists of best and worst costumes abound including on tumblr where some reviews bring the snark.
The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean
Over the course of nearly 20 centuries, millions of East Africans crossed the Indian Ocean and its several seas and adjoining bodies of water in their journey to distant lands, from Arabia and Iraq to India and Sri Lanka.
Called Kaffir, Siddi, Habshi, or Zanji, these men, women and children from Sudan in the north to Mozambique in the south Africanized the Indian Ocean world and helped shape the societies they entered and made their own.
Free or enslaved, soldiers, servants, sailors, merchants, mystics, musicians, commanders, nurses, or founders of dynasties, they contributed their cultures, talents, skills and labor to their new world, as millions of their descendants continue to do. Yet, their heroic odyssey remains little known.
The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean World traces a truly unique and fascinating story of struggles and achievements across a variety of societies, cultures, religions, languages and times.
You Like-a the M&M's? The M&M's is good?
Forget West-bank selzer. Who cares about Zohan's hummus? The dawn of a new era: Chocolate. Schwarma.
I got a girl that live on the hill, she don't love me her sister will
Walking to The Far Lands in Minecraft
Simon Parkin writes 1600 words for The New Yorker online about The Far Lands or Bust!, an ongoing effort to walk to the end of a world in Minecraft. [via Boing Boing] [more inside]
Discursive use of time, ambivalence, banality, and wonder.
What's it really like to be in comics
Throughout February, comics blogging giant David Brothers is doing a twice weekly series of interviews for the Inkstuds podcast, talking about "what cartoonists, academics, bloggers, critics, and other people in or adjacent to comics do". The first episode, in which he talks to Jimmie Robinson about Bomb Queen, Five Weapons and surviving in comics, is up now at Inkstuds and Comics Alliance. (Which has a lot of Five Weapons artwork up, so you might want to use that.)
No, you probably don't want to insert it there.
Simple new invention seals gunshot wounds in 15 seconds. (SLPopSci)
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