October 20, 2015
Thousands of reviews of experimental music
Touching Extremes (and the 2001–8 archive, housed separately) houses a wealth of reviews of obscure, avant, experimental, or otherwise not-terribly commercial music by Massimo Ricci, formerly of Bagatellen and Paris Transatlantic (both defunct), and occasionally still also of The Squid's Ear. [more inside]
D&Diesel
Among other things, Vin Diesel is known for being an avid Dungeons and Dragons player. He's even gotten to play his own D&D character in the movie The Last Witch Hunter. But until recently, we hadn't been able to watch him play it live. To remedy that, the folks at the Nerdist and Geek and Sundry got Diesel and a few other people together to play D&Diesel, an exciting half hour full of natural twenties and growling. [more inside]
GOOD THINGS COME TO THOSE WHO ... ... WAIT
It's the trailer that everyone has been waiting for and everyone is talking about... VENTURE BROS. SEASON 6
Marcel Duchamp meets the Invisibl Skratch Piklz
Vinyl Terror & Horror are Camilla Sørensen and Greta Christensen, two Danish DJs now based in Berlin. They are not your average DJ duo. [more inside]
It’s really nice to have a common bond about something stupid like that.
During that excruciating waiting period, players stake out their preferences. “We’ll give a rundown of the donuts, look at them all and extend them through a combine, like the NFL combine,” safety Harrison Smith says. Donuts are judged on factors such as crispiness, size and frosting distribution.
The Minnesota Vikings' Donut Club has an executive board, membership cards, and a strongly enforced set of donut rules.
"What's the next best thing to astronaut?"
I wear them because I like them & also I was a teenage Goth
When is it socially acceptable to wear black tights? (slTheGrauniad/The Guardian)
Truth as quantified externality
Amazon has posted (on Medium, natch) an aggressive response to the “everyone at Amazon is miserable but also paid well but also crying all the time” story in the New York Times [Previously]. This story and its aftermath represent a bit of a trap, particularly in discussions on Twitter: If you think the original story contained both valuable information and flaws, your default position is to go to bat for the Times; if you read this story as a portrait of a tough workplace written to cast it in the worst possible light, but acknowledge that it contained some worrying anecdotes, then your tendency will be to defend Amazon.
But these too reveal themselves as proxy positions. It’s not story versus story, or publication versus tech company. It’s media versus tech. [more inside]
But these too reveal themselves as proxy positions. It’s not story versus story, or publication versus tech company. It’s media versus tech. [more inside]
Tyreing
DSCOVR EPIC pictures
Yesterday, NASA launched a website hosting daily images of the full, sunlit side of the Earth. They're taken by the EPIC camera attached to the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) that's sitting in L1, ~1,500,000 km from Earth. [more inside]
King of the Wild Frontier
The Cold War gift that keeps on giving.
Just testing the the Davy Crockett may have contaminated 12,000 acres around Fort Carson with uranium and depleted uranium residue.
“In the general mindset of the era, it was deemed a requirement for more covert, squad level nuclear weaponry…called the ‘Davy Crockett,’ it was a 155mm caliber tactical nuclear recoilless gun”
With an explosive yield of .01-.02 kilotons, or the equivalent of 10 to 20 tons of TNT the Davy Crockett was developed for covert units to destroy Soviet infrastructure, engage tank formations or repel larger units.
As the largest conventional ordinance has a blast yield of 11 tons of TNT and was short ranged, very inaccurate and likely to expose users to radioactive fallout and contaminate large areas for years, the weapon was wisely discontinued.
Previously [more inside]
UnZapped
On Dec 8, 9, 10 1973 Frank Zappa and the Mothers did a legendary stink at the Roxy in Hollywood Ca.
The result if these shows is one of the greatest live albums ever produced, even though the voracious tinkerer Zappa dubbed some odds and ends onto Roxy and Elsewhere LP.
(The virgin recordings were later released as Roxy by Proxy), but the holy grail of this event was a never seen video broadcast originally intended for German tv, because certainly nothing like this could ever have aired in the us in 1973.
All that changed on Oct 14th when Roxy: The Movie premiered at the Egyptian theater in Los Angeles.
It will be released on dvd/blue ray Nov. 1st, 2015
Ladies with an attitude
Kurt Vonnegut Apocryphally Has Doomed Us All!
Though it was erroneously attributed to Vonnegut, Mary Schmich first lit the flame, imploring the youth today to wear sunscreen. Baz Luhrman fanned the fire with his hit rallying anthem, Everyone's Free (To Wear Sunscreen). And today? Well, today it was announced that all that sunscreen is massacring coral reefs around the world.
DU BIST KLIEN IN DER HOSEN!
The Story of Technoviking. July 8, 2000. Matthias Fritsch put down the camera on his lap on the back of a DJ van at Berlin's Fuckparade. Unknowingly, he recorded a dancer that became one of the first massively popular internet video memes, at a time downloading stamp-sized MOV and RM files was still norm. But TECHNOVIKING was not pleased, and a lawsuit left Fritsch bankrupt. This is the full story, as told by the creator of the original video with guest artists, sociologists and lawyers, how he (and Technoviking) lost control of their images, the implications of remix culture, the propagation of internet memes, and the impact of the internet on privacy rights. (Slightly NSFW censored private bits, 5 minutes in.)
The Strange Case of Anna Stubblefield
She told the family of a severely disabled man that she could help him to communicate with the outside world. Then, she says, they fell in love. [more inside]
“the ideal often clashes violently with the truth”
Visual Literacy in the Age of Open Content by Allana Mayer [JSTOR]
We have similar stories all throughout history: the moment when a perception—whether a literal way of seeing or a figurative mode of thinking—is assaulted and fundamentally shifts, a non-reversible alteration, a displacement from one’s old ways. Western society has seen plenty of moments like these, moments where a perceptive or critical threshold has been crossed.
Most people have an inaccurate assessment of who is "on welfare."
The mayor of Lewiston, Maine recently made headlines when he called for the state to publish the name and address of anyone receiving welfare benefits. The idea of publicly shaming people for receiving government assistance is not new. But when these stories do arise, we rarely stop to think about what we mean when we say someone is "on welfare." In 1983, Mimi Abramovitz tackled that question head-on in a paper provocatively titled "Everyone is on Welfare." Almost 20 years later, she updated the paper for the new millennium. (Also available on Researchgate). [more inside]
Breast Cancer awareness
The American Cancer Society released new guidelines today recommending that women start getting the tests later, at age 45, and only every other year. [more inside]
CreepyPosta
A Portrait of the Person-Guy
The Person-Guy is the cause of every evil and frustration in your life. The Person-Guy only wears odd socks, because he thinks that wasting our limited lifespan sorting them into matching pairs is indicative of a potentially authoritarian neurosis. The Person-Guy has a minor vocal tic, and it sends you into strange daylight fantasies; tearing out his throat with your bare hands, feeling the frantic little pulses of blood as they spurt and froth around your claws and then go cold. The Person-Guy likes all the same things you like, which is why you hate him. The Person-Guy is not reading this article. Only you are reading this article.
"It's 2015—tell them, go ask a sex worker!"
The Can Do bar came about because sex workers had been advocating for [workers' rights] and working under shitty conditions for years...One day a group of sex workers here in Chiang Mai said, 'Actually the government doesn't get it, nobody understands what we're talking about, we're going to have to build it ourselves, we can't wait anymore.' And so they pooled their money and raised a million baht [almost $30,000] between them all and created the bar. Charlotte England at Vice writes about the only bar in Thailand, and maybe anywhere, owned and run by a sex workers' collective.
I Am Somebody.
"I am somebody. I am God's child. I may not have a job, but I am somebody. I may be Black, but I am somebody. I may not have an education, but I am somebody. You may not respect me, but I am somebody. I may be a Puerto Rican, but I am somebody. I may be an Indian and my land was stolen, but I am somebody." The history of the chant. [more inside]
First, Let's Get Rid Of All The Bosses
Six months after we first discussed Zappo's planned move to a Holocracy, how is it going? When the deadline arrived on the last day of April, 14 percent of the company, 210 people, took the [severance] offer. Twenty of them were managers, I was told, out of a total of 246. It was a difficult day. Tear-stained faces replaced the typical smiles on the Zappos campus. [more inside]
This Creepy Puzzle Arrived In Our Mail
"We received a letter from Poland containing a really weird CD. Written on the disc is what looks like a product key, however upon examining the contents of the CD it’s quite clear that this is a puzzle of some sort."
More, from the Washington Post.
Apatosaurus Jones
Your creep is not even a legit creep
Indian comedy group All India Bakchod teams up with dating site TrulyMadly to present the Creep Qawwali (a form of Sufi devotional music), lamenting online and offline creepy guys. [more inside]
In Conversation With Sarah Silverman.
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