November 29, 2019
Dungeons & Dragons & Cats & Dogs
DM: ‘You come to large wooden door.’
Cat: ‘I knock at the door.’
DM: ‘An orc opens it and asks you to come in.’
Cat: ‘I do nothing.’
DM: ‘He asks you to come inside again.’
Cat: ‘I do nothing.’
DM: ‘Eventually the orc tires and closes the door.’
Cat: ‘I knock at the door.’
Twitter | Threadreader [more inside]
Cat: ‘I knock at the door.’
DM: ‘An orc opens it and asks you to come in.’
Cat: ‘I do nothing.’
DM: ‘He asks you to come inside again.’
Cat: ‘I do nothing.’
DM: ‘Eventually the orc tires and closes the door.’
Cat: ‘I knock at the door.’
Twitter | Threadreader [more inside]
Hyperdub at 15: that fast-slow sound, several labels within one label
Fifteen years ago, a minimal dubstep (in the melancholy UK sense of the term) cover (Discogs) of Prince's Sign O' The Times (YT) kicked off a new label that championed new UK sound(s), marking Hyperdub's transition from webzine (Archived view) to proper label. Back in 2012, Resident Advisor had a chat with label manager Marcus Scott, where he laid out the history and then-future of the label. To mark their 15th anniversary, Hyperdub recently teamed with Adult Swim to release Hyperswim (streaming compilation). [more inside]
#ARapistOnYourWay
The feminist performance #UnVioladorEnTuCamino, created by the Chilean feminist collective Las Tesis is being performed around the world. The name (trans: #ARapistOnYourWay) is a play on the Chilean Police's slogan "un amigo en tu camino" (a friend on your way), and refers to the multiple rape accusations against the police during the current uprising in Chile. [more inside]
Greatness ensued
At last: the definitive history of the Mikhail Gorbachev Pizza Hut ad.
Portuguese India Armadas
The Wikipedia article on the Portuguese India Armadas contains a wealth of information on the establishment of a trade route which, starting in 1497, transformed the world for better and for worse. For almost a century, the Portuguese were able to keep the details of their path to India secret, until a chance piratical action on the way back from the Singeing the King of Spain's Beard and the work of a Dutch spy revealed the secret to the rest of Europe.
Right now, the official U. S. Time is:
ITMFA III: The Search for Articles of Impeachment
The U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee has invited President Donald Trump to its first impeachment hearing, scheduled for Dec. 4, starting a new phase of the inquiry that could lead to formal charges against the president within weeks. In the meantime, Lawfare has written a Starr Report, based on the impeachment investigation hearings, which serve as "the narrative backbone for the articles of impeachment the House Judiciary Committee will now prepare and on which members will vote." [more inside]
Agrarianism in the United Federation of Planets
Dr. Sarah Taber on Star Trek: "time to talk about agrarianism in the United Federation of Planets". (Twitter thread, Thread Reader version)
Is corn still a platform in the future? How do the Picards have all that land for growing grapes? Who's the smartest person at Starfleet Academy, anyway?
Khoi and San communities to benefit from rooibos products
"On the 1st of November 2019, the Honeybush Rooibos and Honeybush Traditional Knowledge Benefit Sharing Agreement was signed. It accords Khoi and San communities with a one-year pilot providing them with a 1.5% benefit of the farm gate price from those who process Rooibos." The commercial cultivation of rooibos, a South African plant increasingly used worldwide in teas and other products, has been dominated by a few hundred white farmers, while the Khoi and San communities from whom the knowledge of rooibos originated have been almost entirely shut out. [more inside]
“Fashion is fun.”
Gamers spend hours customising characters, but don't you dare mention fashion by Victoria Tran [The Guardian] “Ask any gamer and they can likely recount tales of how they spent hours perfecting their look in any video game with character customisation, from The Sims to Dragon Age: Inquisition to any massive multiplayer online game. Customising a character is akin to creating our own animated artwork. It’s arguably one of the best parts of The Sims, for example, and people are ravenous for rare “skins” (better known to the non-gamer as, ahem, “outfits”) in games like Overwatch and Fortnite. Millions of people play video games globally every day, and how they dress in those games matters. So why haven’t we talked about fashion in games more? Games have long been used to explore different facets of life, from fantasy lands to wars, but fashion has fallen by the wayside.” [more inside]
“There Is An Entity That Cannot Be Defeated”
“You Can Hear The Suffering”
“Nearly every Revver who spoke with The Verge said they were exposed to graphic or troubling material on multiple occasions with no warning. This includes recordings of physical and verbal abuse between intimate partners, graphic descriptions of sexual assault, amateur porn, violent footage from police body cameras, a transphobic rant, and, in one instance, “a breast augmentation filmed by a physician’s cell phone, being performed on a patient who was under sedation.” Transcribers for the gig economy service Rev hate the recently slashed rates, but the disturbing content they deal with is even worse.
Trump’s base and the Enquirer’s base just so happened to overlap
Bad Romance What happened to the National Enquirer after it went all in for Trump? (slColumbia Journalism Review)
Trump got his wall after all
In the last two years and 308 days, Trump's administration has constructed far more effective barriers to immigration than "Wall". No new laws have actually been passed. This transformation has mostly come about through subtle administrative shifts—a phrase that vanishes from an internal manual, a form that gets longer, an unannounced revision to a website, a memo, a footnote in a memo. Among immigration lawyers, the cumulative effect of these procedural changes is known as the invisible wall. [more inside]
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