February 16, 2018
Donkey Kong's Timeline Is Truly Disturbing
Be it fridge logic or fanwank, when you think about it the Donkey Kong timeline is truly disturbing.
It's Friday night. There's a bowl just sitting there waiting. Why not?
Robert Plant's 1993 Fate Of Nations was his sixth solo album. It's draws from a lot of influences. Like, a LOT. Side 1: Calling To You [video], Down To The Sea, Come Into My Life, I Believe, 29 Palms [video], Memory Song (Hello Hello) [more inside]
Make comics!
Want to make comics? Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett of Big Red Hair have you covered with their recently updated Resources for Comic Book Creators and comic book writing guide.
LGBTQ activism in the New East
Being LGBTQ is a new series from Calvert Journal that includes Live by night: An evening with Maydana, Ukrainian drag queen and asylum seeker, No Silence:
Growing up LGBTQ in the forgotten world of Transnistria, Secret histories:
LGBTQ life in pre-revolutionary Russia, Horoom Nights: Inside the secretive queer night at Tbilisi’s world-famous Bassiani club, and more... [more inside]
Antiracist Medievalisms: Lessons from Chinese Exclusion
"In the following sketches, I explore how early Chinese Americans created space for antiracist medievalism. Not only did people of Chinese ancestry turn “medieval” tropes and rhetoric against their contemporary detractors, but they also found affirming possibilities to assert a shared humanity and to claim cultural belonging." [more inside]
Love Crime? Is it time for some sweet chocolate Justice?
Since 1976, someone has decorated Portland, Maine, with hearts. Red hearts printed on white copy paper on businesses, cars, and the occasional heart banner on the museum, library or other building. Hearts have spread to other towns. Now, one guy is in a snit. [more inside]
"Panther's Rage" is about T'Challa's failure as a leader
Making the Panther a volunteer schoolteacher in Harlem wasn't an evil thing for the previous writer to do, but it was, as McGregor so pointedly acknowledges, a pretty stupid thing to do. T'Challa isn't an African-American looking for his place in the world, he's an African, all caps, and more importantly, he's the spiritual and political leader of an entire country. If he wants to dick around above the Upper West Side and teach poor kids, that's sweet, but what McGregor realized (immediately, and irritably), was that this effectively meant the character had abandoned Wakanda and all of his people along with it.David Brothers & Tucker Stone write about Don McGregor's classic "Panther's Rage" for The Comics Journal. [more inside]
actually a character wearing a train model as a hat
The right to grieve
"I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know what I’m good for. I don’t know how to come to terms with the fact that I have so much in my head, and so much in my Google Drive, that is basically useless right now. I don’t know how to come to terms with the fact that the life I imagined is not going to happen. I’ve already stopped doing my scholarship, other than editorial work for forthcoming pieces. In a few months, I’ll be done teaching. I don’t know how to come to terms with never doing those things again.
The Final, Terrible Voyage of the Nautilus
Kim Wall went for a ride on a submarine, hoping to write a story about a maker of "extreme machines." She never did. I needed to know what happened. [more inside]
Sworn Virgins
Burrnesha are women who live as men in Albania for the freedom, but the custom is dying out. The strict patriarchy is slowly giving way to a new culture and these sworn virgins are the last of their kind.
And don't even get me started on alligators...
What Color Is a Tennis Ball? — An investigation into a surprisingly divisive question [Marina Koren, The Atlantic]
"The seemingly trivial question tore apart our usually congenial group. Lines were quickly and fiercely drawn, team green against team yellow, as my colleagues debated the very definition of color itself. Swords were brandished in the form of links to HTML color codes or the paint selection at Sherwin-Williams. Attempts to broker a cease-fire, to consider that maybe tennis balls are actually yellow-green—or green-yellow, or chartreuse—were brushed aside. At one point, I lashed out at a colleague who then reminded me we were on the same side."
"The seemingly trivial question tore apart our usually congenial group. Lines were quickly and fiercely drawn, team green against team yellow, as my colleagues debated the very definition of color itself. Swords were brandished in the form of links to HTML color codes or the paint selection at Sherwin-Williams. Attempts to broker a cease-fire, to consider that maybe tennis balls are actually yellow-green—or green-yellow, or chartreuse—were brushed aside. At one point, I lashed out at a colleague who then reminded me we were on the same side."
There is no general theory of networks
Scant Evidence of Power Laws Found in Real-World Networks. Remember when scale-free networks were all the rage? The idea was that real-world networks (including but very much not restricted to social networks) are surprisingly-often well-characterized by a power-law distribution: a node has k connections with a probability proportional to some (negative) power of k. This had implications for every science involving things connected to or interacting with other things! Well, about that...
Tanlines for Children
a creative choice, to say the least, but also cruelly ironic
Guerrero (whose name, in Spanish, means “warrior”) fought the ban, saying that he had merely drunk a tea that included coca leaves—a common enough beverage in Peru, though Guerrero lives in Rio de Janeiro, where he plays for the soccer club Flamengo. But his claim paved the way for his Brazilian lawyers to mount an even more interesting defense, introducing FIFA to its oldest, and highest, character witnesses ever: the Children of Llullaillaco, three mummies named for the icy, twenty-two-thousand-foot-tall volcano in Argentina where they were left by the Incas, five hundred years ago. - As Peru Heads to the 2018 World Cup, Its Star Striker Has Three Inca Mummies to Thank [more inside]
Aren't all dogs ethical? Yes, but these are objectively the most ethical
NYC Ethics Watchdogs! The New York City Conflicts of Interest Board posts the city's objectively most ethical dogs. [SL twitter thread w photos of doggos]
Hello, human person
Can you come up with the same answer as a robot in this word association game?
slow-motion infocalypse
Inside the two years that shook Facebook, and the world
The stories varied, but most people told the same basic tale: of a company, and a CEO, whose techno-optimism has been crushed as they’ve learned the myriad ways their platform can be used for ill. Of an election that shocked Facebook, even as its fallout put the company under siege. Of a series of external threats, defensive internal calculations, and false starts that delayed Facebook’s reckoning with its impact on global affairs and its users’ minds. And—in the tale’s final chapters—of the company’s earnest attempt to redeem itself.[more inside]
you come across a collapsed mall from the Times Before
Couture is weird, and comics creator Jared Pechacek is making it weirder. Electric Lit gathers his collection of tweets turning the 2018 A.F. Vandevorst spring collection into a tale about building community in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
You don't want to know what was in her eye
Abby Beckley had been living on an inactive cattle ranch when she began to have the sensation that something was in her eye. "You know how it feels when you have an eyelash in your eye?" she asked. "That's exactly how it felt, but when I looked in the mirror, I couldn't see anything...I finally couldn't take it any[more]," she said. [more inside]
I'll give you the brightest of stars
M.anifest's new song Simple Love is a slow, luxurious dance through the streets of Tema, Ghana. via okayafrica
Young, gifted and classical
Sheku Kanneh-Mason is a cellist from Nottingham, England. In 2016 he won the BBC Young Musician of the Year award, the first black musician to do so. He's just released his first record-breaking album, which along with classical pieces, has covers of 'Hallelujah' and 'No Woman No Cry'. He also has six siblings who all play to concert standard too.
Online communities reach middle age
Before Usenet and MetaFilter but after email, and launched 40 years ago on February 16th 1978 in Chicago after development that avoided committee inertia, the CBBS (Computerized Bulletin Board System) was created by Ward Christensen (creator of XMODEM) and Randy Suess. It consisted of a homebrew computer with 40k of memory, was managed by a "sysop", eventually contained 20,000 lines of code, and worked well. Announced in Byte Magazine, the sole modem and 300 baud card meant members took it in turns to use, the system restarting with each new call. textfiles.com has some BBS logs and captures: [1][2][3][4]. Problems with the system?? Phone the developers. (2008 FPP, and a busy 2006 "Did you run a BBS?" AskMe)
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