February 20, 2019
Bringing back the Web of 1990
To celebrate the Web's 30th birthday, a reimplementation of WorldWideWeb, the first web browser. [more inside]
ActivisionBlizzard $ATVI Dividend increasing 9% Headcount reducing 8%
Activision Blizzard Reports Record Revenue as They Fuck Over 800 Employees [Waypoint] “Activision Blizzard, a company of more than 9,000 employees who’ve built some of the world’s most popular games, is a few things. They are a company who bragged about having a “record year,” on an earnings call this afternoon, a quarter where only raking in $2.4 billion in revenue was considered a disappointment. They are a company who granted a $15 million signing bonus and a $900,000 salary to a high-ranking executive who joined last month. And they are a company who just laid off around 800 employees, or 8% (!!!) of its total workers. 800 people will be without jobs at the end of the day. 800 people head into an uncertain future, wondering how long their severance and health insurance will get them before the next job. That list of 800 will not include Bobby Kotick. He will, of course, sleep well tonight.” [more inside]
Animals croon with Auto-Tune
Elton is a Bengal cat. His owner autotuned his "love me now" voice, and then did a Yass version. Maggie is a Saluki cross who has also been autotuned: a capella | a tempo. And here's a cat fight. To clear your palate, here's the late Mishka the Husky (previously) singing better than Bieber. [more inside]
It's pseudos all the way down
How to Escape Pseudo-Events in America: The Lessons of Covington. "In an era defined by virality, is there any way to stop a non-story from becoming a real one? What the Covington saga reveals about our media landscape." [more inside]
"Hey, I just wanted to let you know someone is pretending to be you …"
Last year, I found out someone was using my photos to catfish women. He stole dozens of my online photos – including selfies, family photos, baby photos, photos with my ex – and, pretending to be me, he would then approach women and spew a torrent of abuse at them. It took me months to track him down, and now I’m about to call him. I’m nervous, so much so that I have been putting it off for weeks. I sit down and dial. My palms are sweaty. He picks up.–How to catch a catfisher by Max Benwell. [CW: Abusive language]
R.I.P The Billfold: "There is no one right way to Do Money"
Today is the last day of The Billfold. Spun-off from The Hairpin in 2012, The Billfold took as its mandate “Everything About Money You Were Too Polite to Ask," and quickly became a unique refuge in the online personal finance blogosphere: a place for truly honest talk about the harrowing, messy, fallible, and hilarious intersection of money and life. [more inside]
Spider, spider, reflecting bright, in the Cretaceous, in the night
High School amateur fossil hunter, Kye-Soo Nam, discovered "a diverse new spider (Araneae) fauna from the Jinju Formation, Cretaceous (Albian) of Korea" (abstract only of article in Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, via Taylor & Francis Online). In addition to indicating that this extinct family of spiders that were "clearly very common in the Cretaceous," according to Paul Selden, Professor of Geology at the University of Kansas, this find is notable for being discovered in shale, which preserved reflective eyes that enabled their nighttime hunting in two of the fossils from the extinct spider family Lagonomegopidae (University of Kansas). [more inside]
What Is A Socialist?
"I’m beginning here, with a basic example of an unjustified inequality, because I think it’s important to see what I might call “the socialistic instinct” starts. Jack London, of Call of the Wild fame, was a socialist, and he explains in his essay “How I Became A Socialist” that it was not because he had read Karl Marx and accepted the dialectical materialist conception of history. It was because he went out into the world, and he realized that not everyone was like himself, and that the things he told himself about why some people deserved more than others simply broke down once he actually got to know people."
Nathan J. Robinson's speech about Socialism to students at America's oldest, most expensive High School.
Hornbostel–Sachs 412.132
This Cat Does Not Exist
Something something AI to generate (terrifying) images of cats.
Street kitten meets pitbull by way of Pixar
Kitbull is a beautifully animated Pixar short about an encounter between a spunky street kitten and a kindly pitbull. Content warning for offscreen animal cruelty and military grade Pixar heartstring tugging.
I am not a Jew and I was at one time a “revisionist”
In 1980, Robert Faurisson, the late father figure of Holocaust revisionism, sent fellow denier Jean-Claude Pressac, a Nazism-obsessed pharmacist, to the archives of the Auschwitz Museum. Faurisson wanted him to find proof of his theories, but Pressac, immersed in the archives of the SS Construction management Office, found instead irrefutable proof of the use of the gas chambers as a tool of mass murder. Breaking with Faurisson, Pressac kept on investigating and eventually published in 1989 Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers (also), an extensive, meticulously researched monography. In the postface, Pressac chronicles the tormented path that led him from being a "travelling companion" of revisionism to being an authoritative Holocaust historian. He later worked on Russian archives until his death in 2003. [more inside]
Grand Canyon tourists exposed for years to radiation in museum building
For nearly two decades at the Grand Canyon, tourists, employees, and children on tours passed by three paint buckets stored in the National Park's museum collection building, unaware that they were being exposed to radiation. Although federal officials learned last year that the 5-gallon containers were brimming with uranium ore, then removed the radioactive specimens, the park's safety director alleges nothing was done to warn park workers or the public that they might have been exposed to unsafe levels of radiation.
"following my path" would be a better translation
Parno Graszt - Járom az utam / ... In My World (2014) will cheer you up in the morning [SLYT] [more inside]
Karl Lagerfeld, 1935-2019
Karl Lagerfeld, fashion designer who oversaw the transformation of Chanel into an intercontinental superbrand, has died aged 85. [more inside]
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