Sophianotloren

If you’re not me and you don’t live in a cave– unaware that World War II has ended– you’ve probably heard the Meghan Trainor song “All about that Bass.” If you have, perhaps you thought yourself, “Well, that’s refreshing and empowering song about ‘people of size’.” Because at first listen, it is. But listen more closely. The appeals to the male gaze are not empowering:

“Boys like a little more booty to hold at night”

“‘Cause I got that boom boom that all the boys chase”

And I don’t like referring to thin women as “skinny bitches.”

“I’m bringing booty back
Go ahead and tell them skinny bitches that”

Nope. I don’t like it. Women who are thinner than I am are not my enemy; they’re just women who are thinner than I am. That’s it. Women of all sizes should band together to fight body-shaming.

So, sorry, Meghan. Your song is super-catchy, but it’s not the empowering anthem you think it is. You squandered the opportunity to do something incredibly positive and joyful. Try to do better next time; I know you can.

That being said, the video is a sweet, funny, candy-colored treat.

In other news, I’ve just discovered the Sia video for “Chandelier.” (I’m barely kidding about that cave thing; I am *so* out of the pop culture loop these days.) Please watch it right away: the sets and cinematography are gorgeous and so is the choreography. This video haunts me.

What songs/videos are in heavy rotation for you these days?

 

 

This fall, an automated “shopper bot” called the “Random Darknet Shopper” purchased ten pills of MDMA from the dark web. The bot was the brainchild of the innovative !Mediengruppe Bitnik art collective, a group that uses “hacking as an artistic strategy” to “recontextualise the familiar,” according to their website.

!Mediengruppe Bitnik favors elaborate, interactive projects that probe our relationship to digital communication or surveillance technologies — previously, they’ve hacked CCTV cameras and replaced their footage with an invitation to play chess — and they told Marina Galperina of FastCoLabs that the shopper bot experiment was designed to explore alternatives to regulated, mainstream channels of online communication. What becomes of identity and interpersonal communication on the dark web, where anonymity is paramount? If we must choose between monitored interactions on the one hand and impersonal exchanges on the other, how can we forge meaningful relationships on the internet? Caught between the web and the dark web, we are left to choose between performance of the self and radical depersonalization.

Random Darknet Shopper was part of The Darknet — From Memes to Onionland. An Exploration, an exhibition that approached these urgent questions from multiple perspectives. The show, which appeared in Kunst Halle St. Gallen in Switzerland and closed last week, also featured a YouTube history of Anonymous and Eva and Franco Mattes’s “Emily’s Video” (2012), which depicts footage of volunteers reacting to a mysterious video. All the pieces in the exhibition hinged on questions of identity and anonymity.

!Mediengruppe Bitnik’s bot explored these issues at the level of economic exchange, taking depersonalization to its limits. Though Random Darknet Shopper was stripped of anything resembling human identity, it was able to participate without difficulty in the electronic marketplace on the dark web. The bot used its weekly budget of $100 bitcoin to make random purchases. In addition to the MDMA, it also ordered Lord of the Rings e-books, sneakers, and a Platinum Visa card.

In a recent article in the London Review of Books, Andrew O’Hanagan wrote about a similar experiment, in which he created a virtual life for a man who had died. Like the virtually resurrected subject of O’Hanagan’s article, Random Darknet Shopper is non-living proof that digital artifacts can take on the roles we typically reserve for humans. Our Twitter followers or Amazon accounts won’t notice the absence of a feeling, phenomenological self as long as our avatars continue performing their functions.

Philosopher David Chalmers is famed for a thought experiment that tests the boundaries of consciousness: he originated the notion of the philosophical zombie, a monster who resembles us in every way but lacks phenomenological experience. Although philosophical zombies are externally indistinguishable from humans with conscious experience, performing all of the same sorts of actions, they are not “conscious” in the way we typically use the word. As !Mediengruppe Bitnik’s bot demonstrates, the philosophical zombie apocalypse is upon us as digital identities proliferate.

Lawyers, Guns and Money is proud to interrupt your usual string of lazy link with one-liner posts insightful longform essays with an impassioned missive from someone back in the news, an alleged former governor of Massachusetts and professional fundraiser and robotic talking-points spouter. Enjoy!

Gosh, my friends, it sure seems like only yesterday when we were on our way to a crushing victory over the, ah, dark forces of Barack Obama, under whose leadership America’s once-bright future has, um, dimmed, leaving us staring into a bla–

Uh, well, you understand where I’m coming from. “Ann” and I to this day often sit down with our five boys — Tagg, Fritz, Spork, Clog, and (annoyed grunt) — and ask ourselves what happened. They’re growing boys, as you know, and they’ll often scarf down one of “Ann’s” special treats, like unflavored pudding or mayonnaise on white bread. Clog likes his bread toasted, but “Ann” says the shards of toast “feel like machetes” when she tries to swallow it, so it’s plain white bread for us.

I can assure you that our internal campaign figures and computer numbers and whatnot guaranteed a “Mitt” Romney victory — my top advisers assured me of such every time their direct deposit payments hit their checking accounts, and I’m sure they were right on the money. But I suppose some things will have to remain a mystery, like, for example, the exact percentage of our income that “Ann” and I have paid in taxes over the past several years. Only God and Saul, our Israelite accountant, will ever know for sure.

At any rate, while “Ann” and I have made no final decisions about what would be my first real attempt at winning election to the presidency (my first race was merely dabbling, and you’ll recall that my last attempt at the office was undertaken largely against my will, so these should not be counted), I can assure you that we will not be swayed by the opinions of Jennifer Robins at the Washington Post. I plan spend the next few months asking ordinary Americans what I can do to help make their lives better. I’ll go from corporate boardroom to corporate boardroom, from country club to $50,000 a plate gala dinner, to hear from regular folks.

“Regular folks.” Ha! They’re adorable! Many of them, I would imagine, don’t even have elevators for their cars! I guess you’re taking the stairs, Mr. Aston Martin! Oh, gosh, I’m almost giddy today!

These are people who realize that, under a “Mitt” Romney presidency, there would be no ISIS, and Vladimir Putin would know his place. People would be more physically appealing, cancer would surrender to our doctors, and everyone would win the Powerball. That’s the kind of leadership you’ll see from President “Mitt” Romney, and it would be unfair to the American people to deprive them of my own gifts simply because Robert Jefferson at the Washington Post has some problem with me attempting what, again, would really be my first run for the presidency, or political office of any kind, really.

Rest assured that once I have interacted with other human beings in regards to my future plans, I will inform you of same in a timely fashion. Thank you my friends, and God Bless the United States of America!

Mitt “Mitt” Romney

JFK campaigning in 1960.

The kid with the gun looks very bored.

sixpenceee:

The Skeleton located at the Norwich Cathedral. This is dedicated to Thomas Gooding. He asked to be buried standing upright to ease his step into the next world. 

When I’m in a happy state of mind, I often am in Los Angeles, recently you know those Fantasy Tour vans that go around, I don’t know what they’re looking at, they’re looking at studios and things like that, when I pass them in my car sometimes I roll down the window and point myself out to them. Sometimes they don’t notice me, and I’ll go “OK never mind”, but sometimes they go “Oh ladies and gentleman, to the right we have Jeff Goldblum.”

I like him so much.

cos-tam:

    ‘I am in fact a Hobbit in all but size.’

Happy Birthday J.R.R. Tolkien!

Excerpts from a thought-provoking TomDispatch essay by Ann Jones reposted at Salon:

Americans who live abroad... often face hard questions about our country from people we live among. Europeans, Asians, and Africans ask us to explain everything that baffles them about the increasingly odd and troubling conduct of the United States.  Polite people, normally reluctant to risk offending a guest, complain that America’s trigger-happiness, cutthroat free-marketeering, and “exceptionality” have gone on for too long to be considered just an adolescent phase...

Then recently, I traveled back to the “homeland.”  It struck me there that most Americans have no idea just how strange we now seem to much of the world...

At the absolute top of the list: “Why would anyone oppose national health care?” European and other industrialized countries have had some form of national health care since the 1930s or 1940s, Germany since 1880.  Some versions, as in France and Great Britain, have devolved into two-tier public and private systems.  Yet even the privileged who pay for a faster track would not begrudge their fellow citizens government-funded comprehensive health care...

In Norway, where I live, all citizens also have an equal right to education (state subsidized preschool from age one, and free schools from age six through specialty training or university education and beyond), unemployment benefits, job-placement and paid retraining services, paid parental leave, old age pensions, and more.  These benefits are not merely an emergency “safety net”; that is, charitable payments grudgingly bestowed upon the needy.  They are universal: equally available to all citizens as human rights...

In all the Nordic countries, there is broad general agreement across the political spectrum that only when people’s basic needs are met — when they can cease to worry about their jobs, their incomes, their housing, their transportation, their health care, their kids’ education, and their aging parents — only then can they be free to do as they like...

Other things I’ve had to answer for include:

• Why can’t you Americans stop interfering with women’s health care?
• Why can’t you understand science?
• How can you still be so blind to the reality of climate change?
• How can you speak of the rule of law when your presidents break international laws to make war whenever they want?
• How can you hand over the power to blow up the planet to one lone, ordinary man?
• How can you throw away the Geneva Conventions and your principles to advocate torture?
• Why do you Americans like guns so much?  Why do you kill each other at such a rate?

They’ve watched the United States unravel its flimsy safety net, fail to replace its decaying infrastructure, disempower most of its organized labor, diminish its schools, bring its national legislature to a standstill, and create the greatest degree of economic and social inequality in almost a century. They understand why Americans, who have ever less personal security and next to no social welfare system, are becoming more anxious and fearful...

What baffles so many of them, though, is how ordinary Americans in startling numbers have been persuaded to dislike “big government” and yet support its new representatives, bought and paid for by the rich.

There's more at the link.

Posted for my expat cousin Karl in Barcelona, who undoubtedly has to answer the same questions.

In 1974, photos taken by NASA’s Earth Resources Technology Satellite were composited together to create the first-ever image of the contiguous United States taken from space.

A giant photo map of the contiguous 48 states of the United States, the first ever assembled from satellite images, completed for NASA by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Soil Conservation Service Cartographic Division. The map is 10 by 16 feet, is composed of 595 cloud-free black-and-white images returned from NASA’s first Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS-1). The images were all taken at the same altitude (912 kilometers: 560 miles) and the same lighting angle. The images were produced by the spacecraft’s Multi-spectral Scanner System (MSS) in Band 5, or the red portion of the visible spectrum, during the period July 25 to October 31, 1972.

via Flowing Data

The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory robot VolcanoBot is being used to explore volcanoes and could help explain eruptions and other aspects of a volcano’s geology. VolcanoBot 1 has been tested in the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii, and a smaller and lighter version, VolcanoBot 2, is being developed.

The VolcanoBot was developed by JPL postdoctoral fellow Carolyn Parcheta and her advisor, robotics researcher Aaron Parness. The robots could one day be used to explore volcanoes elsewhere in the Solar System.

images via NASA/JPL-Caltech

by uaiHebert

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Horror comedy is a hard trick to pull off.  For a good example, consider the very short web animated series Llamas with Hats.  

Each episode is very short (circa 1:20) and very simple.  One llama asks the other llama about what hes been up to.  The results are pithy, almost entirely dialog-driven, and increasingly horrific.

Try the first one for starters:

"Caaaaaarl...."

(thanks to Steven "Not responsible for the meat dragon" Kaye)

red-lipstick:

Louis Moe (Norwegian-Danish, 1857-1945) - Opus 2600 Bear And Death, 1900    Etching

photo by Annie Atkins

Dublin-based graphic designer Annie Atkins has found a unique niche for her talents–she specializes in graphic design for filmmaking. Perhaps her most high-profile gig to date was as lead graphic designer for The Grand Budapest Hotel, the 2014 comedy film by Wes Anderson. The film was set in a fictional country, which meant that Atkins had to create a dizzying array of props–money, newspapers, and postage stamps, to name a few. Atkins has posted some of the props she designed on her Instagram account. She discusses her work with Wes Anderson in this Creative Review interview.

photo by Annie Atkins

photo via Creative Review

photo via Creative Review

photo by Annie Atkins

via Instagram Blog

redirisheyes:

I wish I could trust people the way he trusts science.

beamkatanachronicles:

jumpingjacktrash:

helloyoucreatives:

You are never alone with a good book. This charming campaign is from Grey Tel Aviv. Via Taxi 

no wonder my room is always a mess. i’ve got whole armies camping in here while i sleep.

#gandalf you fucker stop stealing all the covers

auxcorduroys:

who the fuck runs the mr. clean page

90seyecandy:

me in PE class

kiokushitaka:

megashedinja:

when did smut writers decide that a good synonym for penis was member like fuck outta here my dick ain’t a regular at sams club

it was shakespeare

orevet:

turnoffyourtelevision:

loveyourchaos:

tyleroakley:

Groundbreaking diversity, to be quite honest.

I feel so empowered.

wut the??????????

bittersiha:

ariverisariver:

This is genius.

wE BROKE THEM

If you've ever just wanted to hide when you were in public, but had nowhere to go, then you might want to start wearing your very own "Nutshell," a project by SVA student Eden Lew.

Read more on MAKE

glamoramamama75:

Where there’s a will…

...the Mission, and the Betrayal of Special Forces Major Jim Gant”.  Yes, I finally finished this book and it took ...
Continue reading

I have moved the book review/rant segment over to Experiential Pagan for the New Year.  It should appear every Wednesday there!  This week’s book is the finally completed depressing reading task “American Spartan” by Ann Scott Tyson.  Yes, yes, it left me spitting nails…

The former Major Jim Gant lives in Seattle somewhere with his now wife Ann Tyson.  I admit, book rant aside, I worry about him.  But then, I worry about every veteran of the recent wars (and older ones).  I have three of them (4 if you consider Cold War me) under my roof — but I can’t shelter them all, and America doesn’t seem to give a shit about them.

Well, aside from New Orleans, that is.  That city, so embattled by so much since hurricane Katrina, found the heart and the way to house EVERY homeless veteran.  You know, I don’t give a good damn about how YOU feel about America’s wars.  Men and women are going because of a virtual economic draft — and they come home broken and broke.  They deserve better than life on the streets.  Knowing ALL that is why this week’s reviewed and ranted about book bothered me SO much.

Filed under: Books, War & No Peace Tagged: Afghanistan, war