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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]
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.
MetaClean: “How often should you...”
The Guardian: "Experts on 10 modern domestic dilemmas" give their - varied - opinions on bath towels (ongoing MetaTalk), sheets, wearing shoes indoors, jean washing, toilet brushes (“...a fetid liquid bacteria soup...”), cleaning cloths, dusting, vacuuming, deep-cleaning bathrooms, and showering. The World Wide Web is full of opinions, hygiene shaming, disguised cleaning product ads and more opinions on toilet brushes, the frequency of vacuuming, bathroom cleaning, toilet cleaning, (CW) cleaning after intimacy (“Toss the sex towel in the hamper”, “Dick in the sink”) showering frequency, and various cleaning in general. There is also science around cleaning agents and sprays, cotton towel bacteria, decontaminating kitchen cloths, hand hygiene, and toilet flushing.
There is the potential for elements (and children) being stressed
Illegal Lego builds. A brief, informative, wryly funny explanation of what you are and aren't allowed to do with Lego and Technic sets (if you're creating official builds for market).
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]
Bringing back the Web of 1990
To celebrate the Web's 30th birthday, a reimplementation of WorldWideWeb, the first web browser. [more inside]
Strong as hell
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]
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]
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.
"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]
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]
One must imagine Sisyphus clicking.
Not to be confused with Dipsy's Hat, which contains untold powers.
Ong's Hat: The Early Internet Conspiracy Game That Got Too Real "On a sunny morning in early 2000, Joseph Matheny woke up to find conspiracy theorists camped out on his lawn again. He was making coffee when he noticed a face peering in a ground-floor window of the small, three-story building he rented in Santa Cruz. Past the peeper, there were three other men in their early 20s loitering awkwardly. Matheny sighed and stepped outside. He already knew what they wanted. They wanted to know the truth about Ong’s Hat. They wanted the secret to interdimensional travel." (Ong's Hat previously.)
asking the important questions
Matt Levine, Money Stuff, Bloomberg: Should index funds be illegal?
I have been writing about it since 2015, and I’ve enjoyed phrasing the question maximally as “should index funds be illegal?” That is a little bit of a joke, but not really, because if you take this stuff seriously enough then it does seem like large diversified shareholders—index funds but also other mutual funds—would pose a problem under the antitrust laws, and you’d have to do something about them. One thing I should say about this theory is that, as far as I can tell, almost no one who works in the capital markets or corporate America takes it seriously.[more inside]
"He's a wolf."
“She never looks back”: Inside Elizabeth Holmes's Chilling Final Months at Theranos - At the end, Theranos was overrun by a dog defecating in the boardroom, nearly a dozen law firms on retainer, and a C.E.O. grinning through her teeth about an implausible turnaround. (prev, prev, prev, prev)
"Science writer & communicator"
"Hello my name is Paul, I have a PhD in physics and thanks to a random brain freeze forgot the word for photon so had to call it a “shiny crumb” in front of my colleagues 😐" Other people chimed in with their own mis-, er mal-, um…wrong-word things. (SLTwitter)
You literally cannot mess this up
How we Lost our Ability to Mend [clothes] from Die, Workwear!, "A semi-daily blog about classic men's tailoring and semi-casual attire."
Peter Tork has died at 77
The Washington Post has an obituary. He was my first celebrity crush and The Monkees was the first album I bought with my babysitting money. I am sadder than I should be about this.
◇ф(3ψ2)=666
The Devil's Calculator: A Math Game “In the The Devil's Calculator, all normal arithmetic operators (addition, multipication, etc...) are replaced by a strange diamond symbol, "◇". This represents an evil mathematical operation, a function that does something unknown to its input, and it becomes more difficult and obscure each level. You objective is, through interpolation, to uncover the "◇" function and then work backwards to use it in calculating 666. Once the number 666 has been calculated using the ◇ key, the level is won.” [YouTube][Trailer] [via: Rock Papers Shotgun]