"In the last few years, the rise of free online porn — content-rich sites that tease viewers to subscribe for more — and pay-site juggernauts like Brazzers have put the L.A.-based adult-video industry against the ropes. Its answer, in part, has been the high-dollar parody, designed to attract ComicCon nerds, science fiction fans and other pop culture aficionados who must collect everything within their target oeuvre." -- The troubled US economy affects pornstars too, so
"Porn Defends The Money Shot" (NSFW)
[more inside]
posted by bardic
on Sep 29, 2011 -
80 comments
Adshel is an Australian company that provides advertising on street furniture, such as shelters at bus stops or bins. In the last 48 hours they have been at the centre of a public fight between the Australian queer community and the
Australian Christian Lobby. [more inside]
posted by MT
on Jun 1, 2011 -
70 comments
In 2009,
Ctrl.Alt.Shift, the "youth
initiative of Christian Aid," held a national competition in the UK for aspiring filmmakers aged 18 to 25. Their mission: create a short film treatment based around three key issues: "War + Peace," "Gender + Power" and "HIV + Stigma." The results were then screened to an audience at the 2009 Raindance Film Festival. The films:
1000 Voices,
HIV: The Musical,
Man Made,
No Way Through and
War School.
(All YouTube links. Vimeo links and descriptions of each film are inside this post.) These films deal with adult subject matter and may be disturbing for some viewers. Some may also be nsfw. [more inside]
posted by zarq
on May 24, 2011 -
3 comments
An NIH clinical trial
has shown that early treatment of HIV with antiretroviral drugs reduces the odds of the virus being transmitted to an uninfected sexual partner by 96%, with only one new HIV case recorded out of the 1,763 couples participating in the trial.
posted by schmod
on May 12, 2011 -
31 comments
"Anyone who was around New York City in the late 1980s and early '90s couldn't have missed the work of the
AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, better known as
ACT UP. Its group's activism reached a fever pitch during the early '90s, when the iconic black '
Silence=Death' posters and t-shirts seemed ubiquitous downtown and served as somewhat more defiant symbols for the Gay community than the rainbow flags that took over to serve that role slightly later. ...
So what were we to think as we wandered through
Barneys Co-op in Chelsea yesterday when we spied a whole shelf full of
T-shirts featuring ACT UP's famous imagery [priced each at $50 ... 'a portion of that price tag will go to the activist group'] as if they were magically transported there from 20 years ago?"
[more inside]
posted by ericb
on Mar 14, 2011 -
48 comments
The International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge 2010 - "Researchers are generating mind-boggling volumes of data at exponentially increasing rates. The ability to process that information and display it in ways that enhance understanding is an increasingly important aspect of the way scientists communicate with each other and—especially—with students and the general public. That's why, for the past 8 years, Science and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) have co-sponsored annual challenges to promote cutting-edge efforts to visualize scientific data, principles, and ideas.
This year's awardees span scales from nanoparticles to colliding galaxies, and from microseconds to millennia."
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Feb 19, 2011 -
9 comments
There is
Housing Works in NYC, which raises money for community based AIDS/HIV treatment and housing for the homeless. Here in Chicago we have
Open Books, who uses the money raised from selling donated books to run literacy programs and tutoring programs for children.
Now Minneapolis is getting
Boneshaker Books; an all volunteer run radical bookstore that will house the
Women's Prison Book Project and offer bike book delivery.
posted by bibliogrrl
on Jan 11, 2011 -
17 comments
There is no question that HIV is an ugly virus in terms of human health. Each year, it infects some 2.7 million additional people and leads to some two million deaths from AIDS. But a new album manages to locate some sonic beauty deep in its genome. Sounds of HIV (Azica Records) by composer Alexandra Pajak explores the patterns of the virus's nucleotides as well as the amino acids transcribed by HIV, playing through these biologic signatures in 17 tracks. [more inside]
posted by infinite intimation
on Nov 12, 2010 -
20 comments
"In May, 2002, Jerome Mitchell, a 17-year old college freshman from rural South Carolina, learned he had contracted HIV. The news, of course, was devastating, but Mitchell believed that he had one thing going for him: On his own initiative, in anticipation of his first year in college,
he had purchased his own health insurance. Shortly after his diagnosis, however, his insurance company, Fortis [now
Assurant Health], revoked his policy. Mitchell was told that without further treatment his HIV would become full-blown AIDS within a year or two and he would most likely die within two years after that."
[more inside]
posted by ericb
on Mar 17, 2010 -
139 comments
A new
HIV vaccine is showing promising results, reducing the risk of contracting the virus by 32 percent. While further tests are still needed, the vaccine is a combination failed HIV vaccines
AIDSVAX and ALVAC, based on the Canary Pox virus.
The study itself faced
criticism from the outset.
posted by borkencode
on Sep 24, 2009 -
41 comments
Intended Consequences. It is estimated that 20,000 children were born as the result of rape during the 1994
Rwandan Genocide that claimed the lives of over 800,000 Tutsis. Many of these women also contracted HIV/AIDS as a result. Not only do the mothers have to live with memories of this incredibly horrible event, but they along with their children are shunned by other Tutsi survivors.
[more inside]
posted by itchylick
on Apr 20, 2009 -
22 comments
New Scientist:
What if we could rid the world of AIDS? The notion might sound like fantasy: HIV infection has no cure and no vaccine, after all. Yet there is a way to completely wipe it out - at least in theory. What's more, it would take only existing medical technology to do the job.
[more inside]
posted by andoatnp
on Feb 21, 2009 -
49 comments
New Scientist reports today that inhabitants of the former Roman Empire have much lower levels of a gene variant that protects against the virus that causes AIDS -
CCR5-Delta32 to be exact. Previously, this genetic mutation had been attributed to the spread of the
Black Death.
posted by Lizc
on Sep 4, 2008 -
16 comments
