Steve Dyer

In this short video, Evan Puschak talks about how music is made for Super Nintendo games. That system was first released in 1990 and the audio chips could only hold 64 KB of information, only enough room for beeps, boops, and very short samples. But composers like David Wise, whose soundtrack for the Donkey Kong Country series of games is on many lists of the best video game music, were able to make the SNES sing despite its limited capabilities.

As a fundraiser for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, Micah Sherman and Mark Stetson produced a web series called The Bob Ross Challenge in which 13 comedians attempt to paint along with Bob Ross as he does his thing with the trees and little fluffy clouds. Here’s the first episode, featuring Aparna Nancherla:

I feel like she does a lot better than I would have! The episodes are each less than 2 minutes long…you can burn through the whole season in about 20 minutes. Or if you want to try the challenge yourself, you can watch every episode of The Joy of Painting on YouTube. (via open culture)

jessyvivid:

Infinity 〰

The post My Conversation with Michael Pollan appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Vanity Fair has an excerpt of Small Fry, a memoir by Lisa Brennan-Jobs, the oldest daughter of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who named an early computer after her. Jobs notoriously denied paternity from the moment of Brennan-Jobs’ birth.

Then, in 1980, the district attorney of San Mateo County, California, sued my father for child-support payments. My father responded by denying paternity, swearing in a deposition that he was sterile and naming another man he said was my father.

I was required to take a DNA test. The tests were new then, and when the results came back, they gave the odds that we were related as the highest the instruments could measure at the time: 94.4 percent. The court required my father to cover welfare back payments, child-support payments of $385 per month, which he increased to $500, and medical insurance until I was 18. The case was finalized on December 8, 1980, with my father’s lawyers insistent to close. Four days later Apple went public and overnight my father was worth more than $200 million.

But before that, just after the court case was finalized, my father came to visit me once at our house in Menlo Park, where we had rented a detached studio. It was the first time I’d seen him since I’d been a newborn in Oregon.

“You know who I am?” he asked. He flipped his hair out of his eyes.

I was three years old; I didn’t.

“I’m your father.” (“Like he was Darth Vader,” my mother said later, when she told me the story.)

“I’m one of the most important people you will ever know,” he said.

I don’t know what is going on in this video — boards coming apart and then back together again, trucks on hinges, ice “skating”, and other inventive nonsense on a skateboard — but it seems like a lot of it defies reality in a Newtonian sense. Sir Isaac’s all like, feck thee, thou’st foote wagon is not poss’ble. (Yeah, I don’t know either. Matt Tomasello is good at skateboarding and seems to have fun doing it. Watch the video.) (via @bmovement)

From Edward Burtynsky (known around these parts for his aerial photographs of industrial landscapes) and filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal & Nicholas de Pencier comes a film called Anthropocene.

The Holocene epoch started 11,700 years ago as the glaciers of the last ice age receded. Geologists and other scientists from the Anthropocene Working Group believe that we have left the Holocene and entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene. Their argument is that humans have become the single most defining force on the planet and that the evidence for this is overwhelming. Terraforming of the earth through mining, urbanization, industrialization and agriculture; the proliferation of dams and diverting of waterways; CO2 and acidification of oceans due to climate change; the pervasive presence around the globe of plastics, concrete, and other technofossils; unprecedented rates of deforestation and extinction: these human incursions, they argue, are so massive in scope that they have already entered, and will endure in, geological time.

The film is one part of a larger “multimedia exploration” of the human epoch, which will include a book of new photography from Burtynsky, a traveling museum exhibition, interactive VR & AR experiences, and an educational program.

The film is premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

A reader writes:

I have a coworker who mentions her deceased husband fairly frequently in conversation. It’s been several years since he passed away after a protracted illness. (He had lupus, and she says that they knew it was coming for seven years, so he was able to put away money to provide for her.)

Now she has a boyfriend who wants her to stop wearing her engagement ring from her deceased husband. She is adamant about continuing to wear it, albeit on her right hand.

She recently had surgery, and my officemate and I were worried and wanted to text her in the days following her surgery. We had both gotten new phones recently and didn’t have her number handy, so I looked to see whether she had an account on Facebook Messenger. She did, and I noticed that her profile picture had a man in it who was not her current boyfriend. Curious to see whether it was her deceased husband, I clicked the link to view her profile so I could see the larger version of the image.

Curiosity killed the cat, they say.

The man in the picture turned out to be some sports guy she had her picture taken with, so I scrolled down a bit to see whether she had a picture of her deceased husband. Since we’re not Facebook friends, it only took a moment to scroll down a few years. I saw a post that mentioned her husband and saw that he had responded. I clicked his image to see him, you know, to have a mental image when she speaks of him. I wasn’t trying to be intrusive.

When I went to his page, his image had been updated in January. I wondered if my coworker had been updating his image, but a number of people had commented on it — including his current wife!

I must have made a sound of dismay, because my officemate asked me what was up. Without thinking, I shared what I’d discovered. We were both in shock. We wanted desperately to un-know this, but that is impossible. My officemate was especially appalled because he had saved her job a couple of years back by sharing her sad story with our boss.

My officemate started to share the story with another coworker, but I convinced him not to. I don’t want to be responsible for outing her. Maybe she has a serious mental issue, and I don’t want to be insensitive to it.

So now, as my officemate seems about to burst, I’m wondering what I should do. Should I discuss it with her after work sometime? I wouldn’t want to upset her during working hours, and I wouldn’t want it to get out and have people treat her differently.

Ideally, we would just never mention it again and put it out of our minds. However, I don’t know how to react when she inevitably mentions her deceased husband again. I so desperately wish I hadn’t been curious!

Oooooh.

I can see why this was really shocking! But I also don’t think it requires any action from you.

Maybe she’s mentally ill. Maybe he’s “dead to her” and this is how she handles it. Maybe he faked his own death and she really thinks he’s dead. We don’t know, and because she’s a coworker — rather than a close friend or family member — we don’t need to know. (We want to know, because this is so surprising and odd, but we don’t actually need to.)

It is absolutely weird and uncomfortable that she brings him up a lot, and tells you stories about his death. And it’s not great that your manager was apparently moved not to fire her after hearing she was widowed. (Although that … is not really great management. Give someone space right after a death, yes, but you can’t make long-term employment decisions based on things like who has suffered losses. So some of that is on her manager, frankly.)

But this isn’t yours to address. You don’t need to fix the situation by making her admit she’s been lying, or by calling her out when she continues to talk about him. And you’re not complicit in her lying if you choose to let her go on talking about him without saying anything.

If this were someone who you were very close to in your personal life, it would be hard to maintain any intimacy while this was happening, and so you’d need to handle that differently. But this is a coworker, and if she wants to spin tall tales about her life and no one’s getting hurt, you get to quietly think that’s incredibly strange, but there’s no imperative for you to act.

When she mentions her deceased husband, I’d stick with neutral responses (“hmmm, that’s too bad,” etc.) and just don’t get drawn in.

The exception to this would be if she were actively trying to use the information at work to get different treatment — to get extra time off, or to get out of undesirable duties, or so forth. In that case, you’d have a harder decision in front of you (and I’d have a harder answer to write — although I think I’d still err on the side of “leave it alone”), but fortunately that doesn’t sound like the case.

my coworker says her husband died — but he didn’t was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

In a faux recruitment video that ends with the line “Apply Now You Sick F**ks’, Michelle Wolf blasts ICE and its recruits, drawing links between the Trump agency’s crackdown on immigrants and the actions of the terror group ISIS.

Says Wolf, as DHS Secretary Nielsen, in the clip: “It’s popular nowadays to say ICE is bad, but there’s no better representation of America right now than ICE is. And as an equal opportunity employer, we accept all levels of experience and education, from low to very low, and actively welcome those with diagnosed anger issues.”

The post Michelle Wolf Plays DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in Brutal ‘Recruitment Video’ Explaining What ‘ICE Is’ – WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Remember last week’s letter about the intern who was refusing tasks because of political objections? Here’s the (very interesting!) update.

I apologise for being so late in getting back to you. I had a family emergency and missed seeing that you had posted my question until after you had closed comments. Then I wanted to take the time to read through all the comments (1300+!) before replying. Please feel free to post as much – or as little – of this as you would like.

If I could clarify a few things: the politician in question is not a Nazi, literal or otherwise. He is a dyed-in-the-wool right-wing conservative with whom I disagree on virtually every issue. He is controversial in part because of his private life, which he has made part of his public persona – otherwise, I would believe that his private life is no one’s business but his. To avoid starting another firestorm, I want to make it clear that as far as I know, he has not been implicated in the #MeToo movement. He has, however, been repeatedly accused of cronyism and nepotism, and embodies the cliche of the “family values” politician who regularly trades in his wife for a younger model.

I find myself in the strange position of sounding like I am defending him, which I certainly am not – as I said, I have protested outside his offices before. But I feel compelled to point out that the wilder speculations about his identity and politics were incorrect, if understandable, given that I was reluctant to give any more details about him.

In part, that’s what surprised me so much about my intern’s response. I’m not trying to police anyone’s feelings, but her vehemence seemed disproportionate. What she actually said to me (as close as I can remember) is “I hate that guy so much. If you forced me to have anything to do with him I would keep punching him and punching him and punching him until he fell over on his stupid smug face.’” So, like many of your commenters imagined, it was a hyperbolic – and inappropriate – comment, but not one I viewed as a serious threat to anyone’s safety.

I also want to point out that there is a difference in our institution between a “private tour’”and a “VIP tour.” Again, a number of your commenters were correct when they suggested that the private tour was done for the convenience of everyone, and not as a statement of support for this politician. It is our policy to try and arrange these private tours (with no press or PR attention) for anyone who is in the public eye. And we do this not because it’s a special treat for them – although you could argue that it is – but because it minimises the disruption to everyone else. As much as it seems reasonable to suggest that this man buy a ticket and wait in line like other visitors, that would actually be a disaster. Having someone at his level of national prominence walking openly around with the public would be an enormous security threat (for which we would be responsible). Not to mention, it would completely destroy the chance for anyone else to enjoy the exhibition.

His office approached us to request the private tour. We would – and have – granted the same to anyone at a similar level, on either side of the political spectrum. We have also done this for local and national celebrities and well-known sports figures who want to see the exhibition. Again, I want to emphasise that these are NOT press or PR events; in this particular case, no one was aware of the visit outside of museum staff and this politician’s employees.

Several of your commenters suggested that I was interested in maintaining appearances over morality. I know those comments were intended as criticisms, but I was grateful for them because they prodded me to think more clearly about a point that I think I articulated very poorly before. Namely, that for me, it is very important to think of a museum as an institution that is open for everyone, even those I strongly disagree with. Being welcoming to everyone *is* a moral standard for me. We are a public institution, funded by the public, and should be open to the public. I’m not naive enough to think that museums will fix the world or that my work will transform every bigot who sees it, but I wouldn’t be doing what I do if I didn’t believe in the potential of art and history to change ideas and minds.

That said, I agree with you that there is a place where everyone must draw a line. I don’t know what I would do if I was asked to give a private tour to someone like David Duke or Nick Griffin. I can’t imagine that my museum would put me into such a situation, honestly. But if something like that were to happen, I would almost certainly politely step aside, and be willing to accept any consequences for doing so.

So here’s what happened with the actual situation I wrote in to you about. In my initial surprise at her response, I told my intern that she could bow out. As I said, the offer to be included in such a tour would be considered a perk by a lot of people starting out – not because of the person being given the tour, but because the interns get a chance to see more behind-the-scenes aspects of museum work. As such, I had a number of volunteers from the intern pool eager to step in and do the logistics work. I did the tour solo (with the exception of security people, of course) and it went smoothly.

But I did speak to my intern about her response and the “punching and punching” comment. I told her that that kind of comment was totally inappropriate in any work context, but especially in ours. She seemed surprised, and responded that she thought I was “cool,” which was why she felt free to say what she did. I told her that it had nothing to do with being cool, but with what is appropriate in a workplace, and that a comment like hers – along with her refusal to do the logistics work – could have ended in her termination. Again, she seemed surprised at this, but also seemed to take it in, and she thanked me for my input. Honestly, *I’m* not surprised at her. I have a lot of experience dealing with interns, and often they reach us at the ages of 27 or 28 towards the end of their graduate studies. Many times these interns have literally never had a job before, and they find it hard to adjust to an actual working environment, where they have to show up on time and do things they don’t want to. I’m not denigrating them at all, please understand that. It’s just that they are learning the “soft skills” of working far later than most people do, and I’m usually pretty patient with that while also setting firm expectations.

Anyway, I wanted to thank you very much for running my question, and for moderating the firestorm that it apparently ignited. I appreciated many of your commenters ideas and opinions, and apologise for missing the post on the day, and not foreseeing that this would be such a loaded question. Thanks again!

update: my intern is refusing assignments because of her politics was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

Each week (more or less), I write a newsletter for Kottke.org called Noticing that summarizes the previous week, looks for deeper connections between some of the material, and expands on one or more of the shorter quicklink posts that didn’t get the full blogpost treatment the first time around. Here’s an excerpt from this week’s newsletter, on the internet and wasted time.

…

If all art aspires to the condition of music, then all media aspires to the condition of television. Television is passive and active, shallow and comprehensive, cheap and expensive, gratuitous and mandatory — an easy way to waste time, where you can find anything you want, but it all just sort of happens to you, without frustration or interference.

Dan Nosowitz’s “I Don’t Know How To Waste Time on the Internet Anymore” strikes a chord partly because it shows how the web has become too much like TV (too much corporate control, homogeneity, amateurs playing at being professionals in all the wrong ways), but also not enough like TV (delivering easy entertainment in bingeable quantities). You can still get lost down a rabbit hole on the web, but you have to work at it, and the results aren’t as satisfying as they used to be.

A lot of this rings very true to me. Some of it is unquestionable: the bottoming out of the ad market, and everything that caused that, has made it really hard for niche, indie web sites with an unusual point of view to survive. The commercial websites and traditional publishers who colonized that space are a lot more same-y and predictable.

Social media also transforms our experience. You used to be able to come across a blog or forum post, in your RSS feed or straight up navigating in your browser, and have a relatively fresh and unmediated reaction to it. You could then share that reaction on your blog or wherever. Even the blog style favored generous blockquotes as much as it did hot takes. Now everything feels a lot more picked-over. Something like Yanny vs. Laurel, by the time you actually listen to it for yourself, you’ve seen friends scream at each other at the top of their lungs, a half-dozen quickly-manufactured memes, a dozen or so copycat posts, and five or six scientific explainers or web spelunkers who’ve traced the auditory hallucination’s journey from the web’s bowels to its front pages. All of the moves have been mapped out. There aren’t a lot of surprises any more.

Trust me: I spend most of the week looking for things that I hope will surprise and delight Kottke readers for the one day of the week I manage the site. They don’t just float to the top.

So what does this mean? Paradoxically, wasting time is now more work. You can certainly do it — the web is as full of nonsense as it ever was — but you have to look a little bit harder. You have to learn some new things. You have to find your own corners charting unmonetizable enthusiasms. It’s not just going to happen to you. You have to dig your own rabbit holes.

The other thing is that I’ve come to treasure people who are genuinely inventive and interactive on social media. Finding people who will riff with you and are skilled at interjecting weirdness and intellect is becoming more valuable, to me, than people who have the precisely titrated level of anger or the perfect bon mot at whatever new atrocity has just crossed the stream. That sort of thing is valuable, but there’s a glut of it.

Relatedly: the other other thing is that when the world sucks, the web sucks. The whole country is broken. Fun is harder to find all over. Yet somehow, we do what we can.

requested by  taramacgay

pietropeterimagines:

hollandimagines:

oddityball:

I LOVE THAT THEY KEEP PICKING UP MORE OMG

One of my fav videos on the internet

Omg I saw the first one when I was at comic con!

Here are three essays that make very different arguments but are worth reading, and (I think) worth reading together.

1. “How the Blog Broke the Web,” by Amy Hoy. Hoy’s essay is alternately nostalgic for the early days of blogs and smartly critical of the choices that were made then and how they affected the later development of the web.

Suddenly people weren’t creating homepages or even web pages, but they were writing web content in form fields and text areas inside a web page.

Suddenly, instead of building their own system, they were working inside one.

A system someone else built.

In particular, Hoy argues, the push towards chronological organization and frequent chronological updates privileged blogs over other kinds of early web production, and drove out sites that had a weirder, more perpendicular relationship to time.

2. Dave Winer, “What Became of the Blogosphere?” Winer is focused on a narrower problem, but he gives it wide implications.

What changed is we lost the center. I know something about this because I created and operated weblogs.com. It worked at first, but then the blogosphere grew and grew, and weblogs.com didn’t or couldn’t scale to meet it. Eventually I sold it because it was such a personal burden for me.

The blogosphere is made of people, but the people treated the center like a corporation, and it wasn’t. If we ever want to reboot the center, there has to be a cooperative spirit, and a limit to its scope to avoid the scaling problems. You can’t put a big corp at the center of something so independent, or it ceases to be independent…

There used to be a communication network among bloggers, but that’s gone now.

3. Navneet Alang, “Ding Dong, The Feed Is Dead.” Alang is interested in how the disappearing story is coming to displace the chronological archive.

Even if a tweet didn’t ruin your life, you still have an archive of embarrassment that Facebook has diligently saved for you: ill-advised jokes, too-earnest expressions of emotion, and photos in which we simply look terrible. While movements like #deletefacebook were ostensibly about protecting your data from corporations, perhaps they also reflected a desire for another kind of privacy: a way to just erase all that unflattering history.

What happens next is probably not the overthrow of Facebook or Twitter especially now that those platforms are making a lot of noise about how they want to change. The need for an online presence, even if it’s just LinkedIn, is a big historical shift, not just a fad. But instead of a handful of big, public platforms, I wonder if we can expect a proliferation of smaller, more private platforms to find their place. Not only are they safer and friendlier, but they also foster a loyalty and intimacy that the big networks simply can’t….

These smaller, temporary spaces produce a similar effect to traditional social media—a space to vent and laugh and carebut without the downsides of a public forum.

There are some things that reverse chronology is good for, and some things where it isn’t. There are some cases where a greater visibility and intercommunication is exactly what you want, and some where you want the exact opposite. But we’re also riding the wave of dozens if not hundreds of subtly shaping decisions that are not ours, and maybe were never ours. We can only change them if we understand them first.

That’s a tall order for anyone, even if you weren’t here for the entire history of how everything unfolded in the first place.

White House Correspondents Dinner firebrand Michelle Wolf took a clear side on the civility debate in a segment on her Netflix show The Break on Sunday, suggesting that casually harassing the Trump administration doesn’t work.

“You have to insult them specifically,” Wolf said. “‘You’re a c**t’ doesn’t hurt them. It’s on their vision board.”

Wolf then launched into a barrage of various suggested insults for members of the Trump administration but kept coming back to the First Daughter: “If you see Ivanka on the street, first call her Tiffany. This will devastate her. Then, talk to her in terms she will understand. Say, ‘Ivanka, you’re like vaginal mesh. You were supposed to support women, but now you have blood all over you and you’re the center of a thousand lawsuits.’”

Added Wolf: “Ivanka, you’re like that birth control pill Yaz. At first it seemed like it’d be really cool and helpful, but you need to be immediately recalled.”

She continued: “Is your nickname herpes? Because you’re not necessarily the most dangerous person in the administration but you’re very unpleasant, totally incurable and you always show up when we’re about to get f**ked…Remember, discourse is a path to change and Ivanka is the prettiest tumor in a swiftly moving cancer.”

The post Michelle Wolf Compares Ivanka to Herpes: ‘Unpleasant, Incurable, and Always Shows Up When We’re About to Get F—ed’ – WATCH appeared first on Towleroad.

The post The Ex-Post Dead Are Not Ex-Ante Hopeless appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

gilaryduff:

celticpyro:

dismembered-dreams:

OH MY GOD.

ALEXA NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

My absolute favorite video

square:

This newly released photo of the chaotic clouds of Jupiter would make a great marbled paper pattern.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft took this color-enhanced image at 10:23 p.m. PDT on May 23, 2018 (1:23 a.m. EDT on May 24), as the spacecraft performed its 13th close flyby of Jupiter. At the time, Juno was about 9,600 miles (15,500 kilometers) from the planet’s cloud tops, above a northern latitude of 56 degrees.

The region seen here is somewhat chaotic and turbulent, given the various swirling cloud formations. In general, the darker cloud material is deeper in Jupiter’s atmosphere, while bright cloud material is high. The bright clouds are most likely ammonia or ammonia and water, mixed with a sprinkling of unknown chemical ingredients.

You can view a “charmingly British” short film about making marbled paper right here.

docteryn:

back-that-sass-up:

it took nine seconds for me to fully process what i was watching and then i started LAUHGHING

I would be dead

these guys got me through every night of the summer of 2001.

stream:

Hannah Gadsby: Nanette (2018)