August 19, 2015
R.I.P. Yvonne Craig
You know, it was visually delicious.
"Pee-wee’s Playhouse is where you can stop at every roadside attraction in the world." Patreon's Art of the Title speak with Prudence Fenton, Phil Trumbo and Paul "Pee-wee Herman" Reubens about the two-minute animation that opened each episode of the classic 1980s television program Pee-wee’s Playhouse
Your Sex is Not Radical
Your Sex is Not Radical In queer radical circles and in much of the left, the worlds in which I operate, there’s a widely held idea that one’s political radicalism can be attached to one’s sexual practices. This is why those who practice BDSM and are variously “sex positive” are often equated with left politics.
But the sad truth that many of us learn after years in sexual playing fields (literally and figuratively) is that how many people you fuck has nothing to do with the extent to which you fuck up capitalism.
"Today is the second anniversary of Steve’s death."
Ring stuck on your finger?
A forum game of secrets and treachery
You may have heard of Mafia, a psychological party game where players try to weed out the killers in their midst.
You may not have stumbled across NeoGAF's ongoing forum-based mafia games, though. Each season, games are hosted with media "flavors," chock-full of back-stabbing, mind games, and more twists and turns than a double helix. This season you can follow the madcap, Cthulhu-esqe adventures of tourists stranded on a island with insane cultists. Or perhaps you'd rather go back to Despair Academy with a psychotic teddy bear, or observe as ISIS agents try to catch those KGB bastards. [more inside]
You may not have stumbled across NeoGAF's ongoing forum-based mafia games, though. Each season, games are hosted with media "flavors," chock-full of back-stabbing, mind games, and more twists and turns than a double helix. This season you can follow the madcap, Cthulhu-esqe adventures of tourists stranded on a island with insane cultists. Or perhaps you'd rather go back to Despair Academy with a psychotic teddy bear, or observe as ISIS agents try to catch those KGB bastards. [more inside]
Copy Cat
Bath time! A little kitten tries to mimic mama kitty. [SLYT]
Algorithms, Accountability, #algacc
"Algorithms are producing profiles of you. What do they say? You probably don’t have the right to know." Frank Pasquale, for Aeon: "Digital Star Chamber." [more inside]
Derek Davison's History of Islam for Dummies
Writer, researcher, and Middle East scholar Derek Davison is writing an ongoing series on "a very bare bones, 'just the facts' history of Islam" at his blog, and that’s the way it was. In the introduction, he writes: "I'm going to stick as closely as possible to the most commonly accepted historical narrative, for two reasons: one, because the field is refined to the point where what is widely accepted is probably a fairly good approximation of what really happened, and two, because the commonly accepted narrative (particular for the origins of the faith) is what most people learn and therefore what animates their behavior today." [more inside]
Keeping the search for significance at Bayes
From FiveThirtyEight, a 3 part series on p-values, retraction, and the importance of experimental failure and nuanced interpretation: Science Isn't Broken.
"The human gray area is where I want my hands to glide."
Julie Dillon - artist
Julie Dillion is an award winning science fiction and fantasy artist in a field that rarely nominates women. One of the themes of her work is diversity. And yes, she's up for the Best Professional Artist Hugo again this year.
God help you if you buy pre-crumbled grocery store feta
“If you wanted to dismiss something, you would say ‘this is horiatiki,’ to mean, this is not good,” says Kremezi. “So for a salad to succeed with that name, it must have been a great salad!” Greek The Salad - Dan Nosowitz on authenticity, history, Greek salad, and the very idea of"American Food" (plus two recipes)
The websites you were browsing, twenty years ago
InternetDir95 is a twitter account, tweeting "Every website from the Internet International Directory, published 1995". This was the year Yahoo! was founded (March), Windows 95 was launched (August), the DVD announced (September), and ebay was founded (September). Perhaps redundantly, the twitter account profile also says "many dead links". Twitter account by Jeff Thompson.
Everybody get up, it's time to slam now
The original website for the movie Space Jam, still up and mostly functional on Warner Brothers' servers, is an incredible time capsule of mid-90s web design. In 'Space Jam' Forever: The Website That Wouldn't Die, Erik Malinowski profiles the the site and its creators. The site was rediscovered in 2010 and likely would have been taken down by Warner if two of its original creators weren't still with the company. [more inside]
Josh Donaldson hate-watched The Bachelor with you
The Toronto Blue Jays, owners of the longest playoff drought in North American professional sports, are finally in a bona fide pennant race for the first time since 1993. Despite scuffling through the first half of the baseball season, the Jays' season quickly turned around as a result of a crazy 48 hours prior to the Major League trade deadline that landed the Jays two of the best players in the game to accompany an already impressive line-up. Toronto is abuzz about the Jays for the first time in a generation, having sold nearly half a million tickets since the big trades. Toronto journalist and Jays fan Stacey May Fowles created a how-to guide for new members of the bandwagon. This Blue Jays squad is not your typical baseball team. [more inside]
"For those people the only black stories are those familiar to them."
What the mainstream would seem to want from black writers are only stories of blackness written from a marginal position, on one hand to serve as witness and on the other to affirm for mainstream readers that they remain white, and so privileged. They want affirmation that the inner life of black folks is more or less the way black folks exist in the white imagination."Color Blind: A Pocket Guide to Race in America," by Calvin Baker, author of Grace [.pdf excerpt] and Dominion
Shhh
Following up on their promise last month to release the data they hacked from Ashley Madison (the online infidelity-enablement site) hackers have released a ship-load personal information on ASM users. The hackers claim it is more of an attack on the shady business practices of the corporation than the users. (Though in contrast to other hacks, it looks like ASM managed to do a better job of storing passwords semi-securely). But certainly a lot of people's private issues are now public, including 10,000 folks with government emails, and many writers are warning: "Don't be smug, this is only the beginning. And Wired has some useful advice on checking out if you or a loved one is among the hacked data: Don't.
Aim High: Congressman Louis Stokes, 2/23/1925 - 8/19/2015
The state of Ohio mourns the loss of one of their greatest citizens. Congressman Louis Stokes died this morning at the age of 90. [more inside]
Well I have a pigeon, Lucas Don Velour
First Republican Debate Highlights from Bad Lip Reading (SLYT)
"I'm not holding onto the past. I have a souvenir that I never wanted."
"The truth is too ugly for a general audience. I didn't want to see a depiction of me getting beat up, just like I didn't want to see a depiction of Dre beating up Michel'le, his one-time girlfriend who recently summed up their relationship this way: 'I was just a quiet girlfriend who got beat on and told to sit down and shut up.' But what should have been addressed is that it occurred."
Here's What's Missing From Straight Outta Compton: Me and the Other Women Dr. Dre Beat Up by Dee Barnes. [cw: violence against women, extreme misogyny]
Here's What's Missing From Straight Outta Compton: Me and the Other Women Dr. Dre Beat Up by Dee Barnes. [cw: violence against women, extreme misogyny]
Zozobra, making Santa Fe's fiesta celebrations more with pyrotechnics
In 1924, the longest-running community festival in the United States, Las Fiestas de Santa Fe, got a bit weirder, thanks to the artist Will Shuster. That year, he found inspiration in the burning of Judas effigies, specifically the practice including firecrackers, performed by the Yaqui Indians of northwest Mexico (Google books preview) and he created Zozobra (meaning anxiety, worry in Spanish, nicknamed "Old Man Gloom" or "the gloomy one"). The burning effigy was joined by a fire spirit dancer around 1933, originally created by Jacques Cartier, formerly a ballet dancer in New York. [more inside]
Ben cheezburger etti miyim?
Why Istanbul Should Be Called Catstantinople: The city has long been famous for its large population of street cats, as reflected in a popular Instagram feed and upcoming documentary. “Being a cat in Istanbul is like being a cow in India,” said Sibel Resimci, a musician and confessed cat junkie who says her husband often walks nearly 2 miles to work rather than disturb street cats sleeping on his moped. “For generations, they’ve had a special place in the city’s soul.” [more inside]
How black reporters report on black deaths
"[W]e don't stop being black people when we're working as black reporters." "Over the past month, I've talked to a dozen other black reporters who've covered race and policing since Michael Brown's death — or even further back, since Oscar Grant or Ramarley Graham — and it's been a relief to learn that I'm not the only one."
they'll get you ... in the end
True translation has its own shadows.
Translator's Note.
A translator must naturally take certain liberties with other people’s words in order to wrest the most truth into the text. In this essay on translation, composed strictly of quotations, I have taken the liberty of replacing select words and phrases with “translation,” “translator,” and the various verb forms of “translate.” I have also committed untold infidelities.[more inside]
Fire forming on flame fronts of pressure waves
Next Step: Cheese Subs... No, real homebrew submarines. In the Baltic.
Russian police have smashed an international smuggling ring moving product with an estimated street value of 3 billion rubles into the country. The product? Cheese. Officers recovered some 1,000 pounds of cheese and cheese paraphernalia (rennet and printing equipment for making counterfeit labels). The ring was supplying a growing underground black market for cheese in Russia. [more inside]
LEGO kits vs LEGO tiny pieces + imagination
The LEGO sets of our youth promote creativity better than the kits of our kids' The take-away (for me) was that people like kits, because worrying about building something from scratch is hard, but that reliance on kits decreases creativity, not only around the original topic but also across other activities.
U.S. Trans Survey
The U.S. Trans Survey, currently being conducted by the National Center for Transgender Equality, "will give researchers, policymakers, and advocates the ability to see the experiences of trans people over time, how things are changing, and what can be done to improve the lives of trans people."
“I have not met a single human being who’s motivated by bad news,”
The Weight of the World: Can Christiana Figueres persuade humanity to save itself? by Elizabeth Kolbert [New Yorker]
Of all the jobs in the world, Figueres’s may possess the very highest ratio of responsibility (preventing global collapse) to authority (practically none). The role entails convincing a hundred and ninety-five countries—many of which rely on selling fossil fuels for their national income and almost all of which depend on burning them for the bulk of their energy—that giving up such fuels is a good idea. When Figueres took over the Secretariat, in 2010, there were lots of people who thought the job so thankless that it ought to be abolished. This was in the aftermath of the fifteenth COP, held in Copenhagen, which had been expected to yield a historic agreement but ended in anger and recrimination.
Almost No One Sided with #GamerGate
Almost No One Sided with #GamerGate: A Research Paper on the Internet’s Reaction to Last Year’s Mob An in-depth research project that suggests that the vast majority of people do in fact equate GamerGate with online harassment, sexism, and/or misogyny.
You will know fear
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