October 13, 2014
#Gamergate, as we know it now, is a hate group.
I do not say this to make the people of #Gamergate seem any more important, or effective, or powerful, or to give any sort of new credence to their ideas. Rather, this is just a structural designation: as immediately dismissible as their tactics and stances might be (at least to anyone who has not become victim to them), I believe it's important to note that group was formed like a hate group and functions like a hate group in every way.Social researcher Jennifer Allaway examines the ways in which #GamerGate functions as a hate group, using a 2004 study by Linda Woolf and Michale Hulsizer called Hate Groups for Dummies: How to Build a Successful Hate Group as her framework. In it, she identifies four essential elements to any hate group:
- the leadership which originally inspired the movement,
- the recruitment strategy it uses to appeal to insecure and impressionable gamers,
- the social-psychological techniques by which it spreads its message and enflames its members' beliefs,
- and, finally, the process by which it dehumanizes its victims, and turns them into targets whose attacking earns group praise.
Adorable Animal Family Portraits
Animals (especially wild animals) don't have the vanity or the discipline to pose for organized family photos, but wildlife photographers will still do their best to capture photos that look like they could be corny family holiday post-cards.
I spent 10 years doing New York all wrong
Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., was a lonely aspiring writer in New York, generally unhappy. Then she moved to Brooklyn and found that community made all the difference.
A little night music with interpretive dance
Race and indigeneity
Can New Zealand teach the US anything about race?
The US was founded on the idea of freedom and liberty. But freedom and liberty, which might be called the “sacred” values of American society, were exclusive ideas. In the colonial period there was, writes Dee Brown in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, “an almost reverential attitude toward the ideal of personal freedom for those who already had it.” Treaties are the mechanism to extend that freedom and liberty – that is, the right to self determination – to indigenous peoples who were promised it, but do not have full exercise of it.
Moscow, we have a problem
The First Spacewalk. How the first human to take steps in outer space nearly didn't return to Earth.
Miners, Gnomes, Kobolds, Wolves, and the Hooded One of the Harz Mountain
"It is somewhat of a mystery why the English-speaking world has had to wait until 1981 for the first translation of the Deutsche Sagen (German Legends) by the Brothers Grimm. After all, the Legends, which first appeared in 1816 and 1818, were translated into French, Danish, and even Rumanian in the nineteenth century, and have always been considered a vital source book for folklorists and critics alike. Perhaps we have always assumed that the German Legends had been translated since many of them are known through romances, novels, adaptations, selective translations, films, comic books, and references in critical studies. The two most famous examples are Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser and Robert Browning's 'The Children of Hameln.'"-Jack Zipes, in an approving review of Donald Ward's translation of the Legends. Ward's work has since fallen out of print, but you can read select legends at the eclectic Golden Scales folktale collection.
All in the Family
Groots, Black Widows, and Every Johnny Depp
Visualizing Game Flow
Reversing the Design: The Two Games of Chrono Trigger is an essay that examines the way that Chrono Trigger tells a story in two parts to the player using every aspect of the game's design. Aside from analyzing the game story itself, the authors also look at things like weapon power, player agency, quest design, graphics, dungeon layouts, boss scripting, and the battle system. The essay concludes with a list of design considerations that can be applied from Chrono Trigger to games of all genres.
Candyland
Sugar: the evolution of a forbidden fruit
Sweetness was meant to be irresistible. We are born with a sweet tooth. Babies drink in sugar with their mother’s milk. Sweetness represents an instant energy boost, a fuel that kept our ancestors going in a harsher world where taste buds evolved to distinguish health-giving ripeness and freshness from the dangers of bitter, sour, toxic foods. Sugar gives us drug-like pleasures – lab rats deprived of their sugar-water fix exhibit classic signs of withdrawal. When things are going well, we blissfully say, “Life is sweet.”[more inside]
"You hide, they seek."
Worst. Landlord. Ever.
The Public Advocate for the City of New York has released an interactive map, The NYC Landord Watchlist, which maps the city's most poorly managed buildings. The map uses data from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development to list over 6,800 buildings across New York. You can search the map by address and by borough. If you select a property listed on the map you can view the number and type of violations it has received. [via]
Zach Anner's (usually) comedic adventures with friends
"Hey America, my name is Zach, I'm from Austin, TX. I think we met at Jeanine's party once and really hit it off, but I think we should get to know each other bit better ... I have a lot to say, but I don't know where I would fit, because I have something called cerebral palsy, which I believe is the sexiest of the palsies...." That's Zach Anner's audition for Oprah's Your OWN Show, a reality competition show, where Zach was one of the two winners. His show was called Rollin' Around the World with Zach Anner, which got shortened to Rollin' with Zach, and you can see many clips from that on OWN's YouTube channel. But the show didn't last, and instead Zach and friends turned back to the internet to get involved with a travel show about more realistic travel adventures, called Riding Shotgun (YouTube playlist). But that's not all ... [more inside]
Oh what could compare to a day in the swaaaaamp...
For those of you celebrating Thanksgiving today (and anyone else), here's Dick Cavett's 1971 Thanksgiving Special. [more inside]
Researchers grow Alzheimers's in a petri dish
Breakthrough Replicates Human Brain Cells for Use in Alzheimer’s Research In the past, what once seemed to be promising breakthroughs in Alzheimer's Disease research have later petered away to nothing, but this latest announcement in the New York Times sounds like genuine good news. A new method of creating a brain in a dish can clear away one major obstacle in research, by providing an truer medium on which to test drugs, and a clearer indication that the theory that amyloid accumulation that leads to plaques and tangles is correct.
Crack, the CIA, and the Contras
In 1996, Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News exposed a shocking series of facts: that the CIA and the Reagan administration were covertly funding the Contras in Nicaragua by aiding and abetting the flow of crack cocaine to America, particularly inflicting terrible damage on inner-city black communities. In response, the Washington Post, New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times all began vicious campaigns to attack and discredit Webb. Although Webb was later vindicated by a CIA Inspector General report among other things, the damage was done, and the story still has an air of obfuscation and confusion around it. Along with the release of a new documentary, Freeway: Crack in the System, as well as a feature film starring Jeremy Renner as Gary Webb, Kill the Messenger, key figures in the CIA-crack cocaine scandal are beginning to come forward. Could this be the start of a renewed exploration of the government's complicity in the rise of crack in America?
The Math Behind the Rolling Shutter Effect.
Here's a pair of blog posts explaining the math behind the "Rolling Shutter Effect":
Playing Detective with Rolling Shutter Photos and Rolling Shutters.
Star Trek Fact Check
Sifting through decades of publications, oral history and archival records, Michael Kmet sets the record straight on numerous aspects Star Trek: TOS production history lore. Was "Spock's Brain" originally conceived as a comedy episode? Did Roddenberry write the lyrics to the theme song as a cash grab? Which of the Mercury Seven did Roddenberry try to get as guest stars? [more inside]
the dangerous precision worship
Among a rising chorus of folks speaking out about problems caused by America's obsession with football at every level, author (and fan) Steve Almond's voice stands out the loudest. His new book Against Football argues that "our allegiance to football legitimizes and even fosters within us a tolerance for violence, greed, racism, and homophobia." In a nutshell "Fans should stop watching." Needless to say the book has provoked a strong reaction in fans (and defensive sportswriters), most notably in New York Mag, with Jonathan Chait's personal story of how football made him a better person: "In Defense of Male Aggression: What Liberals Get Wrong About Football". [more inside]
The NSA and me
The NSA and Me is an essay by James Bamford, author of The Puzzle Palace, an early book on the agency. It details how he came to write the book, and the NSA's efforts to keep him from publishing it in the late 70s/early 80s.
A rumbling sound then three sharp knocks -- Ba-ba-ba-dook-dook-dook.
The horror genre is traditionally even more of a boys' club than Hollywood at large. In a nice break from convention, though, two of this year's most acclaimed horror films were written and directed by women.
Honeymoon, about newlyweds whose getaway is disrupted by... visitations from... something, is the feature film debut of Leigh Janiak. It got strong reviews from The Dissolve and The New York Times, among others, and is now available on iTunes and on VOD in the US. Here's Janiak talking about how she got the film made.
The Babadook, about a woman whose son develops a pathological fear of a monster in their house, was written and directed by Australian actress Jennifer Kent. It premiered at Sundance this year and currently boasts a 96% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Some have tossed around terms like "flat-out masterpiece" and blasphemies like "outdoes Stanley Kubrick." The high-brow likes of Film Comment ran an interview with Kent. The film will be released in the U.S. later this month.
Honeymoon, about newlyweds whose getaway is disrupted by... visitations from... something, is the feature film debut of Leigh Janiak. It got strong reviews from The Dissolve and The New York Times, among others, and is now available on iTunes and on VOD in the US. Here's Janiak talking about how she got the film made.
The Babadook, about a woman whose son develops a pathological fear of a monster in their house, was written and directed by Australian actress Jennifer Kent. It premiered at Sundance this year and currently boasts a 96% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Some have tossed around terms like "flat-out masterpiece" and blasphemies like "outdoes Stanley Kubrick." The high-brow likes of Film Comment ran an interview with Kent. The film will be released in the U.S. later this month.
My favorite ice cream comes from ~cow
A day in the life, imagined 50 years from now, by ftrain: "It’s interesting when you scan old history scrolls to learn just how panicked everyone was about total global micro-surveillance. They just didn’t see it as a means of liberation, like we do now. Of course they lived in the era of giant government-run spying computers like Multivac. No one could imagine the upside of having every human interaction observed by penny sensors at all times. I’m glad to live in a world where a young woman can hop into a self-driving car with a total stranger and not feel a bit of concern." [more inside]
"The ESF ... considers that the statement cited above is slanderous"
Last year, Dr. Amaya Moro-Martin, an astrophysicist specializing in circumstellar disks and planetary systems, started a great deal of discussion in the astronomy community when she wrote an open letter to the Spanish Prime Minister explaining that she was leaving Spain because of the bizarrely oppressive bureaucratic policies of the Spanish government and their broken promises to scientific researchers. This year, she has written an opinion piece in Nature arguing that Europe's drastic research budget cuts are short-sighted. In response, the European Science Foundation (ESF) has threatened to sue her unless she retracts the statement that called an evaluation process supported by ESF "flawed".
"It's not gonna hurt me when you cry"
I'm still here, but yet I'm goneI'm Not Gonna Miss You is Glen Campbell latest and last ever song. Diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease back in 2011, he embarked on his farewell tour which finished 2012. Now checked into a long term Alzheimer's care facility, "I'm Not Gonna Miss You" is his farewell song to his wife in the knowledge that the disease is taking away his memories of her.
I don't play guitar or sing my songs
They never defined who I am
The man that loves you 'til the end
You're the last person I will love
You're the last face I will recall
And best of all, I'm not gonna to miss you.
A Word for Autumn, by A.A. Milne
"There is a crispness about celery that is of the essence of October. It is as fresh and clean as a rainy day after a spell of heat. It crackles pleasantly in the mouth. Moreover it is excellent, I am told, for the complexion. One is always hearing of things which are good for the complexion, but there is no doubt that celery stands high on the list. After the burns and freckles of summer one is in need of something. How good that celery should be there at one’s elbow".
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