Sophianotloren

The people who run football provide one with such joy.

The NCAA makes Roger Goodell look like a man of principle. As a response to the fear of college football players unionizing, the NCAA’s big schools have begun paying stipends to players so they have live with some level of dignity. Of course the coaches now see opportunities to fine players for whatever they decide is a rule violation. Such as at Virginia Tech:

From the Deadspin piece linked above:

Just look at that bullshit right here. (And note that the scale roughly indexes the priorities of a meathead college football coach—a dirty locker, for example, is apparently more than three times as bad as being disruptive enough in class for an instructor to report it.):

These are fines being thrown at players who, aside from a piddly shit cost-of-attendance stipend—$3,280 or $3,620, depending on whether a player is from out of state or not—aren’t getting any kind of monetary compensation in exchange for their labor. The Times-Dispatch has another photo, in which fines for “improper equipment” are detailed. A seventh offense would have cost a player $1,600.

Tommy Tuberville, head coach of Cincinnati, is talking the same game as Virginia Tech. This is ridiculous, especially when the players have no means to appeal these fines except for the same people who are fining them. Also, where is the money going? Who is accountable here? In other words, these players need a union.

Speaking of bullshit, let’s go back to our old friends who run the NFL. You know what I hate about the NFL? All the meaningless cross promotions for the military and breast cancer that don’t actually do anything but make the NFL look all awesome and patriotic and pro-woman when it is only interested in making money and has an enormous problem with its violent game bleeding over into widespread domestic abuse.

Deadspin again broke open just how bankrupt all this is. The St. Louis Rams pulled a stunt where they surprised one of their cheerleaders with her husband just returned from the military. Oh, everyone is just so happy, right? The Rams look so good! The NFL looks so patriotic! Well, about that… Turns out the husband was not only serving in the less than dangerous combat zone of Korea but that he is, wait for it, a Busch! And the cheerleader? A former aide to Laura Bush and the daughter of a well-known right-wing Illinois political family. The couple had their wedding ceremony at the Vatican. In other words, this was a stunt that in addition to the usual military pablum was designed to serve powerful and wealthy families of the area. Big deal, right? But on top of it, the cheerleader’s mother is running as a Republican for state representative in Illinois and is using the video of this to promote her political career.

It makes sense that an NFL team would go out of its way to do something special for a member of one of the most powerful families in America instead of, say, a local grunt who’d served in a combat zone, because these reunions really aren’t orchestrated and televised for the benefit of the soldiers and families involved. They are done because cozying up to the military is a good way for the NFL to market itself as a noble civic endeavor while making some extra money, and because the American football-loving public loves a chance to share in a bit of un-earned catharsis—watching two smiling, photogenic soldiers embrace in relief is a great way to forget about all the bodies that have piled up. If a given reunion happens to basically be a viral political ad—and given that Candace Ruocco Valentine is not only the member of two connected families and a former White House intern but has pursued or is pursuing both a JD and a doctorate in public policy analysis, one suspects that this moment may be shared on some campaign page of her own before too long—it’s hard to be too put out. That is, after all, what they all are.

Between this and the Brady case, that’s the NFL for you in a nutshell.

Thanks to Bruce Vail for sending me this hilarious propaganda comic General Electric put out in 1947 during the debate over the Taft-Hartley Act. He asked me to credit the Maryland labor activist Bill Barry in hunting this up and putting it into a PDF file. Enjoy!

Many of the best books in classic literature innovated some aspect of storytelling, but few can claim to have ventured into tinkering deeply with language itself. Over at Lit Hub, Stephen Sparks writes on some of the best books that have created their own languages. To “inhabit languages unique [to the book],” Sparks argues, is to attempt to capture “the singular nature of consciousness”

Related Posts:

• “Pop,” “Soda,” or “Heaven Bubbles”?
• The Rumpus Interview with Susan Barker
• A Bookstore in Brookline
• Teaching the Diaries of the Holocaust
• On Being Both an Editor and Writer

Tides

WebGL browser-based music video by Petit Sapin with track by Bronze Whale is audio responsive and procedurally generated, making each viewing slightly different to the previous one.

See for yourself here

The personification of death goes back centuries, with Thanatos of ancient Greece and the pale horse rider of Revelation. Death as a skeletal grim reaper, however, was cemented as a symbol during the plagues in Europe, which stretched from the 14th to 18th centuries.

This year marks the 350th anniversary of the Great Plague (1665–66), the last major outbreak of the bubonic plague in London. To coincide with the anniversary, the Guildhall Library is hosting London’s Dreadful Visitation: The Great Plague, 1665, an exhibition that features printed plague material; some of it, like the “Bills of Mortality” that counted weekly deaths, reveal the period’s macabre imagery. Archaeologists have also been excavating a burial pit as part of a new London rail link project, discovering 30 victims who were all interred on the same day. Meanwhile, the Crossrail Project shared a 360-degree video view of the in-progress study of the believed 1665 Great Plague pit. There’s some evidence that rather than an abyss of naked bodies tossed together, limbs tangled in rot, coffins were in fact still being used — in other words, some respect was still being given to the dead despite the huge death toll. Over three centuries later, the impact and history of the Great Plague are still evolving.

In Representing the Plague in Early Modern England, Rebecca Totaro wrote:

In early modern England, death was a common visitor, coming in many shapes, but however horrifying and dehumanizing they were, leprosy, smallpox, and syphilis, famine, war, and murder in plague-time became lesser manifestations of death. […] No other disease altered physical, social, religious, medical, and civic behavior and beliefs at once, generation after generation, and sometimes decade after decade, year after year.

A map shared by the Guardian shows the density of burials in 1665. At the conclusion of 1666, it’s estimated that up to 100,000 people were dead from the plague — a quarter of the city’s population.

On broadsheets and illustrations, especially in media intended for the masses, the “Black Death” was often depicted as a wandering skeleton, sometimes wielding an arrow, shovel, or scythe. The vision of death or disease as an animated corpse predates the plague, yet the skeleton became a more popular visual around this time, representing the threat of an epidemic that seemed as though it could come from your friends, family, or neighbors. In the 19th century, the transmission of the plague would finally be connected with rat fleas; in 17th-century London, suspected infected people were quarantined behind closed doors, with red crosses painted on the wood. The plague mingled with the city, infecting rich and poor in a constant mortal dance. In The Black Death, Joseph Patrick Byrne writes that the “image of Death as an entity had a more standardized iconography in the West by the fourteenth century, and this evolved as the pestilence recurred. […] The massive presence of Death during outbreaks of pestilence made these messages immediate, however, and popularized the images.”

One of the earliest danse macabres was painted in the Cimetière des Saints-Innocents in Paris in 1425. Now destroyed, it showed skeletons joyfully cavorting with pope, doctor, duke, and citizen alike, and the theme caught on across Europe. London, like other cities in Europe, suffered several plagues before this “Great” one in 1665; by then, the image of death as a reaper, as a skeleton stalking the living, was secure. At the same time, many illustrations were moving towards a more realistic visualization of the horror, like an etching of two women lying dead in a street, a baby still feeding at one of their breasts. Yet the skeleton remained, continuing to ramble through our art and culture over the centuries. On a broadsheet from that era, a bony figure faces the wall around London, an hourglass and arrow raised triumphantly in its hands, a coffin at its feet. Above it are the words: “Lord, have mercy upon us.”

I’ve been seeing a zillion memes like this today about Kim Davis, the Christian Kentucky Clerk who is going to jail for contempt of court, because she’s refusing to do her job and issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

1) First of all, Kim Davis only converted to Christianity four years ago. But her most recent divorce was in 2008, seven years ago. The claim that she’s being a hypocrite isn’t even true.

2) Secondly, this sort of attack is slut-shaming. And gleefully vindictive in a way that makes us look ugly. And worst of all, mean to her kids, who probably don’t want thousands of strangers posting about their birth dates, or to have that information broadcast to all their classmates.

3) It’s obvious that Kim Davis can’t win legally, and the end of the legal road here is that same-sex couples will be able to get marriage licenses everywhere in Kentucky. So nothing is accomplished by attacking Kim Davis personally, apart from making her even more of a martyr for her cause.

4) While we’re at it, if you see anyone attacking Kim Davis for her looks, please tell them to go fuck themselves.

UPDATE: Seriously, Kim Davis’ lawyer? Seriously? Lawyer representing Kim Davis compares her to a Jew under the Nazis

Relieve yourself of the conventional biennials and triennials of the art world with the first art festival dedicated entirely to bathrooms. The smooth-named Toilennale is currently occurring in Japan, home to the world’s most complex and high-tech toilets, in the southwestern city of Oita. Commissioned by the city council, it brings together Japanese artists who have transformed 16 public restrooms into sites for art installations — kind of like pavilions at a traditional biennial, except, you know, each pavilion comes equipped with thrones for human waste (and no, this is not actually a large-scale Rem Koolhaas installation).

Officials have not stated whether the exhibition, which opened in July and runs through September 23, will actually recur every two years. As organizer Eisuke Sato told Quartz last year, the Toilennale is meant primarily as a way to boost tourism, providing “visitors with the opportunity to become familiar with Oita through art and bathrooms.” The festival basically attests to the fact that Japan’s public restrooms are so clean and cool that they warrant marketing as destinations one could find on TripAdvisor. (Oita already has a “transparency toilet” that shows off its interior when vacant.)

For this year’s Toilennale, one park lavatory literally becomes a sweet site, transformed inside and out by a trio of artists into an enormous piece of pink candy titled “Melting Dreams.” A video installation by art duo Tochka projects images of people painting on the mirrored, outer walls of a bathroom, celebrating bathroom graffiti as art rather than a nuisance or a crime. Other installations call for audience interaction beyond the bowl: the performance group contact Gonzo has posted an email address in multiple sites; shooting them a message leads one to view the works elsewhere — perhaps at a site some may consider more pleasant than a water closet.

Like any typical art biennale, the Toilennale also hosts a number of workshops and performance art pieces, except its offerings include a poetry reading that invites audience members into toilet stalls for private sessions. Of course, since these places are still open to use for their original functions, the festival has a couple of regulations: “Please knock the door before entering a private room,” its brochure states. “Please don’t forget it is a toilet. Someone may want to use it.” That’s wise advice, but it may be tough to follow especially for those who want to sit through, for example, artist Tatsuo Majima‘s piece, which is a 90-minute-long, one-on-one lecture on modern art history, presented on a toilet-side tablet.

These works reimagine the bathroom as a sterile space, but Toilennale isn’t the first time the Japanese have plumbed the idea of bathroom as gallery. The art-flushed festival is sponsored by TOTO, the country’s manufacturing giant of everything toilet-related, who last year installed a gallery at Japan’s international airport that turns going to the loo into a carefully designed, immersive experience for all. On display like works of art, the toilets are accompanied by LED monitors screening videos of dancers from the all-female Strange Kinoko Dance Company.

TOTO also made headlines last week after opening the doors to its new museum that invites visitors to plunge into the evolution of lavatory design. The local lifestyles during historic periods like the Taisho, early Shōwa, and Heisei are explored through gradual changes in toilet bowls, seats, faucets, urinals, and more.

In all seriousness: if there’s a country that deserves several outlets to celebrate the design of its toilets and bathrooms, it would be Japan, where sleek seats for excretion offer features so advanced that some require guides to explain their butt-pampering buttons. (Incidentally, it is also the nation that brought us the seminal work, “Everybody Poops.“) The Japanese, however, are far from the only ones who cherish the craftsmanship of comfort stations: a quick browse through the online-only Art Museum Toilet Museum of Art (a name as elegant as “Toilennale”) shows that museums around the world take the art of bathroom design pretty seriously. We’ve come a long, long way from Duchamp.

If you've ever driven along Highway 280 in the San Francisco Bay Area, you've probably seen this home. Read the rest

I never liked that cat.

Hey I’m coming on tour, POSSIBLY NEAR YOU, with my new book, Step Aside Pops!

so see you THERE (maybe)

[x]

I started the SoloPoly blog about three years ago, but I haven’t been posting much here lately. I’ve been thinking about that, and I’ve realized it’s because I’ve already said most of what I needed to say specifically about solo polyamory.

Solo polyamory is definitely a wonderful approach to life and relationships, and it continues to be a treasured aspect of my life that resonates with both my values and my preferences. But right now, I’m focusing on other aspects of my life. That’s where my energy needs to go.

This year has been pretty challenging for me in many ways, so I’m focusing on tackling those challenges — and nurturing the opportunities that are emerging from them.

What’s up?…

Well, on a practical level, this year I’ve hit some of the downs of the inevitable ups and downs of self employment. These financial dry spells have happened to me many times before over the past two decades of self employment, and I always get through it. I’m not in dire straits, or panicking. But I do see that it’s the right time for me to make a serious, concerted push at building a business that’s more sustainable than simply selling hours and articles (ultimately a losing game, since my time is a finite resource).

So I’ve been knuckling down to try to accomplish that goal in a way that capitalizes on my passions and might do people some good. (Yes, I’m talking about my Off the Escalator series of ebooks on unconventional relationships, which I’m currently preparing for publication. If you’ve enjoyed reading me here, please follow me there. It’ll be totally worth your attention. Trust me, this is way bigger than just solo polyamory.)

…Meanwhile, on the personal front, I’ve weathered some loss this year — including the loss of an intimate relationship that I’d treasured for most of the prior year. This has been a hard one to work through, but I am working through it. I’d just rather not say much about that experience here; it’s pretty personal, and it’s not only my story to share.

The takeaway is: All relationships are dangerous — or at least risky. That’s just how it works. Fortunately, love is rarely fatal, so there’s no point in getting bitter about it. We’re all grownups here.

The end of that intimate relationship did force me to face, and accept, some uncomfortable things about myself.

One thing I love about solo polyamory is that it allows me to have the flexibility to accommodate many kinds of love in my life — romantic, sexual, friends, family, community, and love for myself as well. But just because I’m flexible doesn’t mean I can roll with every kind of change, or have zero expectations, try as I might. I really, really do try to roll with change and have low expectations. But incompatibilities arise anyway. People grow, and they grow apart. Sometimes pretty suddenly and surprisingly.

Losing this relationship hurt me, but it didn’t rip my life apart. That’s by design — it’s a key advantage of solo polyamory. To be honest, what’s going on with my work is far more disruptive on a practical level, day to day. Still, admittedly, the confluence of these changes sure hasn’t been a picnic. (2015: are we done yet?)

That said, I’m not whining about losing love, or a big chunk of my income. I’ve deliberately chosen a way of life, love, and work that is pretty low-overhead and resilient, if not always comfortable. I deliberately do not require any of the trappings that tend to make conventional relationships, or full-time jobs with benefits, hard to leave. I’m more vulnerable in some ways, much less so in others. I’ve formed my own home base, and I can sustain it. Lovers can leave me if they want to. Clients can cut back if their budgets or needs change. It all works out eventually. My talent is spotting opportunities, and I’m trusting that right now.

For the last several months I’ve had no lovers at all — not my preferred circumstance, but it happens. However, I’m not desperate to find a lover. I feel very resolute that I only want lovers who actively choose to keep connecting with me — not who stay with me from inertia, need, laziness or obligation.

Yes, there will always be relationship lulls and difficulties that require effort and adaptation. I’ve demonstrated many times that I’m willing and able to do that work (in fact, I’m quite skilled at it), if I feel strongly enough that the connection is worth it. However, if the fundamental desire to nurture a deeper loving connection ceases to be mutual, it’s time to let it go, even if I’m not the one who lost interest.

I don’t regret my choice of solo polyamory and its emphasis on creating relationships of ongoing volition, not obligation. Even though it can get really rocky sometimes, ultimately solo polyamory helps keep me grounded and free — including free to be a better lover and friend. Rocks are just part of the ground.

Love, intimacy and tenderness are so beautiful and precious, it’s natural to want to continue sharing them in some way. However, human beings are moving targets, often unpredictably so. Sometimes in motion, we connect beautifully and affect each other deeply, in lasting ways. I know my former sweetheart elicited some wonderful qualities and capacities in me — and I daresay that I did in him as well. Those gifts remain, even though we’ve moved apart.

Yeah, the process of disengagement can really suck. So far, I’ve found no way around occasional severe suckage in life — short of Zen enlightenment, which continues to elude me. (It’s still not available on Amazon Prime. Also I’m a shitty Buddhist, despite living in Boulder.)

So to that end, to be kinder to myself and my former sweetheart, I’m taking a temporary break from interacting with him. I need the space and time. My intention, and his, is to resume as friends later when we’re both really ready for that. I hope that’s how it goes, but I’ll accept however that emerges and won’t force it.

The good news is I’m healing — both with time to myself, and with the love and support of many friends through this process. Also, I have my health, and I have a kickass project — two things I can’t take for granted. I live in an amazing town, state, and home which suit me, thanks to my own choice and effort. My feline overlords continue their benevolent dictatorship. The Earth continues to spin on its axis. The laws of physics have not been revoked.

New lovers and other opportunities will emerge eventually, they always do. It’s okay. And then I will get hurt again, or I will hurt others. That’s okay too — even though it may feel like hell in the moment, and in the immediate aftermath. Pain happens, and it passes.

Since my current focus in life is not my own romantic/sexual connections, I’m not sure what else I have to say in the SoloPoly blog for the time being. If something relevant comes up, I’ll speak up. I may pop in from time to time to let you know what’s going on.

But if you don’t see me post here for awhile about solo polyamory, don’t worry. I’m doing what I need to do, and you know where to find me. Also, know that it’s extremely unlikely that I’ve abandoned solo polyamory.

I do hope you check out and support my Off the Escalator book project, even though it won’t be exactly the kind of writing I’ve been doing on the SoloPoly blog. Actually, I think it might be much better, since these books will features over 1500 voices of people in unconventional relationships, not just one.

Thanks. Seriously, thanks — the readers of this blog helped get me through some very hard times in the last three years. You folks rock — and you’ve affected me in deep, lasting ways, for the better. I’m most grateful.

For now…

rstevens:

😨 Kate’s worried about the new Star Wars:

http://www.dieselsweeties.com/archive/3886

Check out my newest collection, Wetware: Cyberpunk Erotica ($3.89)

Above: “All About The Woman” Agent Provocateur AW15 Lookbook

• “What I have learned from examining the site’s source code is that Ashley Madison’s army of fembots appears to have been a sophisticated, deliberate, and lucrative fraud. … It’s possible, as one person put it to me in email, that Ashley Madison was actually a pretty decent hookup site for gay people—but that was mostly because the system was designed to ignore them.”
  Ashley Madison Code Shows More Women, and More Bots (Gizmodo)

• A rally and demonstration has been slated to take place outside the federal courthouse in downtown Brooklyn in an effort to denounce the prosecution of the CEO and staff of RentBoy.com. Last week, the offices of the longtime online escort advertising directory were raided in New York by the Department of Homeland Security.
  Protest Slated Over RentBoy.com Prosecutions (XBIZ)

• “But let’s not dwell on Super Hornio Bros.: there are an awful lot of other depictions of Mario’s genitalia out there, the vast majority of which are drawings in which Mario acts as a surrogate for the viewer; the real focus of these cartoons is Princess Peach. Some of these drawings are part of grander graphic narratives, male fantasies that repurpose videogame characters from all eras and genres and species into a single “utopian” fuck session.”
  Does Mario have a penis? (Killscreen Daily)

Gratitude to our sponsor in Spain, women-run Lust Cinema.

• The path to market for the first-ever women’s libido drug began in 2010 when Dr. Irwin Goldstein chased a pharmaceutical executive around a Miami medical conference. Goldstein’s profile rose in connection with the 1998 FDA approval of Viagra, Pfizer’s breakthrough erectile dysfunction drug. Goldstein was instrumental in the clinical trials.
  Meet the controversial doctor behind the new “Viagra for women” (Mother Jones)

• Nerve turned 18, and its essay on sex then and now, through its own lens, is limited and depressing.
  Literate Smut (Nerve)

• School is starting again, and with it the nonsensical protests by conservatives of the dirty parts of Ontario’s new health curriculum for elementary schools.
  Sex-education protest organizers are just making things up now (Ottawa Citizen)

Thank you to our sponsor, Nubile Films.

How much has AHF spent on political campaigns & lobbying? Get the facts here: http://t.co/KFcipJXjWa

— Kink.com (@kinkdotcom) September 2, 2015

• The Free Speech Coalition today petitioned California’s attorney general to conduct an audit of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation to determine if the organization’s nonprofit status should be revoked. The FSC said that over the past four years, the controversial Los Angeles-based healthcare organization appears to have willfully and repeatedly violated multiple laws and regulations related to political spending by a nonprofit.
  FSC Calls on Calif. Attorney General to Probe AHF (XBIZ)

• One of the world’s most-viewed pornography Web sites is offering a new $25,000 college scholarship for a student who will be judged partially on a homemade video submission answering a single question: “How do you strive to make others happy?” Pornhub.com, which touts 78.9 billion online video views each year, recently began accepting submissions for the scholarship as part of the site’s expanded philanthropic efforts.
  Porn site offers $25,000 college scholarship, asks students: “How do you strive to make others happy?” (Washington Post)

• “The prefix “pan” originates from Greek, meaning “all” or “every”. Pansexual people are attracted to all kinds of people, regardless of their gender, sex or presentation. There are several genders, and while some trans people do not fit into the traditional gender binary, some do. So for example, while a bisexual cis woman may be attracted to cis men and women, I am attracted to cis people, trans people, demigender people, and genderfluid people, to name a few.”
  I’m pansexual – here are the five biggest misconceptions about my sexuality (Independent UK)

Thank you to our sponsor in France, Abby Winters.

• A woman who posted sexually explicit images of her girlfriend to hurt and humiliate her after an argument has been given a suspended sentence. Paige Mitchell, 24, admitted uploading four intimate photos of the victim to her Facebook page. She is the first woman to be sentenced for an offence under revenge porn laws introduced in England and Wales in April.
  Woman pleads guilty to posting revenge porn photos of girlfriend (Guardian UK)

• Genderqueerness refers to an identification with neither, both or a combination of male and female genders across a spectrum. Genderfluid, androgynous, non-binary and other terms are also used by those who fit this description in some way.
  9 Things To Never Say To Someone Who Is Genderqueer (SheWired)

• This week, the debate about decriminalizing sex work continues on Shortwave, with Maxine Doogan, President of the Erotic Service Providers Network in San Francisco, and Taini Bien Aime, Executive Director of The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women.
  Should sex work be legal? (PBS NewsHour)

Thank you to our sponsor and friends, Pink Label TV.

• A large Kaiser Permanente study in San Francisco among people at high risk for HIV found none of them contracted it while using preexposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, a two-drug combination designed to prevent the disease’s spread.
  Study finds pill prevents HIV infection in high risk population (UPI)

• Second Puberty: A Humorous, Informative Guide To HRT will be a sex-ed short about HRT in the form of one of those videos about puberty we all had to watch in school, only with jokes.
  Kickstart this: new sex-ed video about ‘Second Puberty’ for trans people starting HRT (Unicorn Booty)

• Adult entertainment conglomerate MindGeek reacted today to MetArt’s copyright and trademark infringement suit waged last week, denying its allegations and calling it “frivolous.” “MindGeek is astonished that MetArt has chosen MindGeek, its long-time content partner, as the next target of its newly adopted business model of filing baseless claims,” MindGeek said in a statement today.
  MindGeek Calls MetArt’s Suit ‘Frivolous,’ Warns of Counterclaims (XBIZ)

• Non-consensual behavior is a problem at kinky & BDSM events. Last year professional pervert and sexual health educator Maxine Holloway worked with the BDSM & kink, and sex worker community to initiate the ASK FIRST Campaign. “Let’s take the ASK FIRST Campaign to the NEXT LEVEL.”
  Ask First: Support consent at this year’s Folsom Street Fair! (Indiegogo)

• LA Weekly says that if someone wants an adult performer in their Hollywood production, they should call this gatekeeper, but I’m not sure why. They write, “Howard Levine, 60, has become one of the go-to people to whom L.A.- and New York-based mainstream productions turn when they need to source male and female porn stars for racy roles and cameo appearances.”
  Need a porn star for your TV show? Call Howard Levine (LA Weekly)

The post Sex News: Super Mario’s penis, Ashley Madison’s fembots, Nerve’s depressing birthday appeared first on Violet Blue ® | Open Source Sex.

celibatemachine:

Mädchen in Uniform (1931, Leontine Sagan)

First a warning, musical;

Then the hour, irrevocable.

The leaden circles dissolved in the air.

― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Exclusive: MSNBC to Expand Morning Joe One More Hour; Kate Snow Gets Afternoon Role

More sweeping changes are coming to MSNBC per a well placed source.

As reported in this space exclusively last week, Kate Snow of NBC News will be taking on a substantial role in MSNBC’s dayside programming. Ms. Snow formerly a weekend anchor for Good Morning America and a frequent face seen on the NBC Nightly News and Dateline will inherit the 3-5 p.m. ET time slot on weekdays on MSNBC.

Also of major note, Morning Joe will be expanded to a four-hour program (it’s currently three). Starting soon, the political roundtable show can be seen from 6 a.m. ET until 10. Note: With the 2016 race heating up, and the great political theater that has come with it and only promises to continue, it only makes sense to expand the network’s editorial page in the morning.

One notable causality to emerge from these moves is current 9-11 a.m. anchor José Díaz-Balart. With Morning Joe going to 10 a.m., Tamron Hall will then take over the 10-12 noon slot, thereby leaving Mr. Díaz-Balart as the odd man out.

...

Following the aforementioned Snow in the 3-5 p.m. block will be Chuck Todd at 5 p.m., a move that was also previously reported by Mediaite in late July.

...

Yaskawa Electric in Motoman’s Center exhibit

Video uploaded to Facebook by Noriaki  Nakagawa on an exhibit at the Motoman Center (a company that specializes in industrial robotics).

Sadly, I cannot embed the video, but can watch it here

This isn’t the first of its kind (using robotics and displays have been used quite a bit for presenting new cars at trade shows, and all owe a debt to the project ‘Box’), but it is a good implementation nethertheless.

Archives all have a politics embedded within them. Intended or not, the words used to manage collections set agendas, and what is collected and what remains absent is always political. Furthermore, many collections were outright stolen from cultures of less military might or economic power. To consider this thoroughly demands a reconsideration of the archive not as a dusty storage unit of finite objects, but as a deeply complex and living intersection of histories. It is with this understanding that Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin curated 125,660 Specimens of Natural History at Komunitas Salihara, in Jakarta, Indonesia.

125,660 Specimens of Natural History is an evolving curatorial and research project that looks at Indonesia’s colonial legacy as embodied in natural history collections. In particular, Spring and Turpin have focused on Russel Wallace, who co-discovered the theory of evolution with Charles Darwin. In his research, Wallace amassed a collection of 125,660 natural specimens from the region and which Springer and Turpin invited 13 Indonesian and 13 foreign participants to explore. The exhibition includes 10 new artworks, zoological specimens, books, archival materials, and a collection of negatives documenting the Indonesian archipelago’s changes at the turn of the 20th century.

For those of us who cannot stop by Jakarta, the two are collaborating on a book series Intercalation: Paginated Exhibition (which Hyperallergic already covered) that deals with disparate cultural and environmental histories through experimental curatorial work. Springer and Turpin’s forthcoming third volume looks further into Alfred Russel Wallace and the legacy of colonial science in Indonesia, further extending the 125,660 Specimens exhibition, and includes many of the artists and zoologists involved.

Ben Valentine: How did this project come to be?

Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin: There are multiple strands that led us to engage in the project together, which we first started to talk about around May 2013 — more than two years ago by now. The idea itself developed in the context of a week-long workshop in the framework of the SYNAPSE International Curators’ Network at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, as part of “Das Anthropozän Projekt.” This is where we met, in the context of a discussion regarding curatorial agency in the Anthropocene. Etienne was about to move from the US to Indonesia to take on a new project [Peta Jakarta] about climate change, urbanization, and environmental change. Anna-Sophie had already engaged in a series of previous book and exhibition projects dealing with cultural archives, colonialism, geopolitics, and the museum. The concept of the “archipelago” was something she was already exploring in her work about curatorial practice.

Beyond these personal elements, Alfred Russel Wallace’s chronicle, The Malay Archipelago — which was published in 1869 after his return from his eight years spent in Southeast Asia — remains one of the most popular travel books of all time. Nusantara is both one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots as well as a region with the highest and fastest rates of environmental destruction. We became increasingly interested in how we might investigate contemporary land use against the background of Wallace’s detailed descriptions and collections. We thought that it would be a fertile starting point for a curatorial project to visit “the collection” of the famous 125,660 specimens he gathered on his expedition. One of the first things we learned, however, was that unlike in the context of many anthropological or ethnographic collections from the colonial period, natural history specimen collections rarely remain a coherent whole because they tend to be reassembled according to taxonomic classification systems (where the collector plays an insignificant role).

We also engaged in curatorial fieldwork, both by visiting dozens of natural history collections which hold specimens from Wallace’s eight years in the Malay archipelago, as well as traveling to some critical sites to consider land use transformations in Indonesia. The multi-arts center Komunitas Salihara, in Jakarta, became our host for the project, and later we partnered with scientific curators from the Indonesian natural history museum (MZB), which is part of the Indonesian Institute of Science (LIPI). These institutional collaborations gave us a platform to enter into dialogues with more than 20 artists. Half of these artists are from Indonesia; we are very proud that the exhibition presents 10 new works, which were created in conversation with us and with the scientific curators from LIPI.

BV: What relationships between the archive, environmental degradation, and colonialism did you uncover in the research for this exhibition?

AS & ET: While the devastating effect of contemporary deforestation on species habitats is relatively well known, one of the most interesting stories regarding 19th-century collecting practices is their less obvious implications in earlier forms of resource extraction and deforestation. Wallace’s expedition was unique in the sense that he traveled as a commercial collector, not a well-funded scientist with a big team (as Darwin had on the Beagle, for example). He reached many very remote areas and discovered countless species that were new to science, including, famously, at least one bird-of-paradise species that was later named in his honor (Semioptera wallacei). However, Wallace also often benefitted from already existing logging roads. He also realized that there was hardly any better place for gathering a lot of insects — like the large beetles he so favored — than recently felled trees. For this reason, one of the most profitable collecting sites was an active coal mine in Northern Borneo.

Realizing that there existed such an active relationship between historic specimens collections and earlier levels of colonial resource extraction was a powerful mechanism for us to research natural history exhibitions along the lines of what Rob Nixon has termed “slow violence” — the relatively invisible and incremental processes of ecological destruction.

BV: You write that the project “explores how trans-cultural collaborative approaches to artistic and scientific practice can address urgent environmental questions.” How does this exhibition address those questions? 

AS & ET: Wallace was a British collector who sent a massive collection of specimens to Europe. Based on this material, he began to understand and formulate a theory of biogeography and a theory of evolution by natural selection, which he would co-publish with Charles Darwin in 1858 while still in Nusantara. Both the material itself and the knowledge embodied in the collection have a relation to Indonesia that hasn’t been very clearly articulated. We wanted to emphasize Indonesia’s geography, biodiversity, and transformation in this first iteration of the project. It was for this reason that it was important to stage the initial exhibition in Indonesia and later travel it back to Europe while giving it a different form. In Indonesia, as guest curators, our role was to instigate connections between artists and scientists; we were permitted a certain flexibility with respect to disciplines, and this enabled us to make certain connections through the exhibition. 

Regarding the second part of your question, something which drives our collaborative work is an interest in the creation of spaces that disregard and/or go beyond established boundaries. In the exhibition, this is pursued through the overall exhibition design, as well as in the way materials are distributed in the space across an island landscape of viewing tables. While 125,660 Specimens of Natural History is staged within an art gallery, artworks are presented alongside a number of other artifacts, objects, documents, and reproductions; these include scientific artifacts such as MZB’s zoological specimens, historical documents such as maps, and other documents such as excerpts from historical publications, as well as contemporary scientific and environmental studies. We made a choice not to foreground the distinction between which objects might count as art and which objects could be read as scientific. Instead, thanks to their diversity of media and materials, we hope that all the elements in the exhibition can co-produce a lively landscape of positions, stories, and connections that viewers move through in order to discover a variety of different possible itineraries and readings (rather than following one defined narrative route).

Meanwhile, a second iteration of the project is planned for late April 2016 in Berlin, where we will partner with the Humboldt University and the Museum fur Naturkunde. Many of the artworks created in the context of the Jakarta show will travel there and some will be further developed. The curatorial perspective will expand to include the narrative of Wallace in South America (where he spent four years collecting specimens prior to his Asian expedition) as well as a discussion of the role of Prussian forestry science in the development of the mono-cultural plantations as well as address anthropogenic species extinction.

BV: What are some lessons learned during creating this exhibition?

AS & ET: As in any large project in the arts you always have to learn a million new things to make everything happen. In a way, this is why we enjoy this kind of work so much — to a certain degree the rules aren’t completely set yet. Outcomes are never completely clear or predictable for a very long time, and yet you keep the momentum going and eventually the elements start to come together, including the collections, archives, research materials, and artworks. The exhibition begins to take shape from the years of work that created its parameters or contours. The fact that we have the opportunity to produce the upcoming Berlin version of the project also means that we have the rare a chance to actively reorganize and expand the material for another show. This is very exciting, but there will be completely different challenges coming our way and we will again have to figure out many new things. 

125,660 Specimens of Natural History continues at Komunitas Salihara (No. 16 Kebagusan, Pasar Minggu, Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta, Indonesia) through September 15. 

Data shows arrested black juvenile males are booked into jail at a 25 percent higher rate than whites

ponderation:

Mountain Lake by Felix Schmale

(via transylmania, vindsval)

After a social media uproar, the Denmark-based Serious Games Interactive removed a “Slave Tetris” mini-game from their Playing History: Slave Trade. The brief section of the game aimed at 11 to 14 year olds, in which you are “working as young slave steward on a ship crossing the Atlantic,” apparently was aimed at showing the horrific conditions of slave ships.

The game was launched in 2013, but resurfaced, especially with US audiences, through a 25% sale recently on games platform Steam. Unfortunately, even giving them a huge benefit of the doubt that they were attempting to make this history accessible, the company’s response has not been compassionate about why using the gameplay of Tetris (and “Slave Tetris” is in fact a term they use themselves) might be offensive. Here’s their notification on Twitter of the redaction:

That’s hardly a mea culpa, and no way an apology. On their Steam page, where the game remains, there’s this update:

Apologies to people who was offended by us using game mechanics to underline the point of how inhumane slavery was. The goal was to enlighten and educate people – not to get sidetracked discussing a small 15 secs part of the game.

Their CEO Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen responded in equally unsympathetic tones to the numerous detractors on Twitter (he seems to have deleted his account). Complex collected some of his responses like: “Slave ships were stacked as tetris.. point is to disgust people so they understand how inhumane slave trade was- search the net.” You can see the scene in question in this gameplay video by Jim Sterling on YouTube:

As you can see after the Tetris scene, the best the guiding mouse character can politely muster is it “was certainly not nice.” Would that the troubles with the Serious Games titles would end there. Regrettably, this is far from the only seemingly cluelessly offensive game on their docket, nor is it even the only use of Tetris gameplay for stacking human bodies. Observe this screenshot from Playing History: The Plague, where the same Tetris gameplay is used to stack corpses in a mass grave:

In addition to the Playing History series, Serious Games also offers President for a Day – Floodings where “YOU are the President of Pakistan. With two weeks to Election Day, the monsoon could not come at a worse time. And in its wake comes famine, cholera, rebels, and much more.” The much more includes “nuclear missiles that must be protected at all costs.” It’s joined by President for a Day – Corruption in which you are “an African president” (no country specified). And in their Global Conflicts series, such scenarios as a Bangladesh sweatshop and child soldiers in Uganda are the focus of games.

Liz Dwyer points out at TakePart that this is not the first time using the slave trade in a game has sparked controversy, with Mission U.S.: Flight to Freedom accused of dumbing down history and turning it into something fun. Gamification of history isn’t the problem, and there’s definitely a place for games in education, with organizations like Games for Change encouraging the social impact of interactive narratives. That’s why it’s disheartening to see an education game go so poorly, and for its creators to be so hostile towards criticism. Obviously a company that has devoted itself to so many education titles is interested in history and finding new ways to connect with it, and this is a chance for dialogue on how that can happen, rather than dismissing its detractors.

Author: Pai Osias Source: Mobile Web (M2)

RT @mccrabb_will: The details in FURY ROAD are myriad. Note that the Five Wives' message is written around the design of sperm. http://t.…

We rejoin our story as the slow-motion GOP freakout over the !Sudden!Discovery! that the Republican party is full of -- gasp! -- Republicans ...



... continues to dominate the nation's Grand Guignol comedy circuit (for today's example we turn to the Breitbart Collective Farm):

LIMBAUGH: TRUMP MOVEMENT EXPOSES LOW REGARD CONSERVATIVE INTELLECTUALS HAVE FOR ORDINARY AMERICANS

Which is certainly horrifying.  And not funny at all.  And bitterly funny-as-hell.

But let us leave the fog and thunder of America's political media battlefield where everyone is feigning surprise that, under it's tissue-thin veneer of David Brooks respectability, Conservatism is a roiling cesspit of ignorance, racism and crazy...

...and return to a simpler time.  A time before YouTube and Instagram.  Back before your 'umble scrivener was even a blogger -- when I was just a long-winded commenter at the late Steve Gilliard's News Blog.

Steve's comments sections are long-gone now, existing only in the memories of those who found a home there and stomped the jolly fuck out of the trolls that sometimes stumbled through the door (Looking at you, "bloomie".)  But sometimes Steve would haul a comment up from below-decks and turn it into a post, so while all of my comments have turned to digital dust and blown away... thanks to Mr. Gilliard occasionally front-paging my comments, what you see below was saved from the bony fingers of internet entropy.

I am reposting it here because I think from time to time it is vital for us on the Left to to look back and remember just how fucking spot on we have always been about the GOP, and how aggressively we have been slandered and ignored by the Beltway media and by the political elite precisely because we have been right about the Right all along.

From The News Blog in March of 2005:

They are serious

Driftglass posted this in comments and it's too damn funny to stay there.

IMHO it’s as simple as: “Never jump into bed with someone who’s crazier than you are.”

For the Suburban Gated, the non-deranged gunnies and the Tax Cuts Uber Alles Republicans, it’s all jolly good fun having a romp with the Fundies…as long as they keep delivering the 20% margin the GOP must have to win anything and as long as they stay the fuck away from my house and family, its all just good kinky fun…

…until the sun comes up, and you realize that the Electoral Candy you were offered was just bait to get you into the Windowless Fundy Panel Truck. Oops.

And now you’re waaaay out in the country somewhere you don’t recognize without your pants, and you start to figure our that all the Burning Crosses and Swastikas and Apocalyptic Paraphernalia that tricks out the inside of the van isn't tatted-up Goth Chick posturing.

And Randall Terry and Tom DeLay wave to you from the front seat and say, “Mornin’ shug! Get ready; we gonna burn us some ‘a them Chirst Hatin’ Abortionists today.” Or Fags. Or Negros. Or Liberals. Or Ay-rabs. Or Jews. Or, really, Anybody.

And all of the slack-jawed yokels who were so eagerly helpful while you were passing you’re Lovely Tax Cuts are sitting around you giggling…and armed to their snaggled teeth.

And then you hear, “Bring Out The Gimp.” (Which, for my money, should be the Democrats’ Lead Media Message for the next four months.)

Oh. God. You mean these crazy fucks were serious? Like, really, really serious?!

No shit they’re serious, Suburban Weekend Bad-Ass -- and it's not exactly like you weren't given Ample Warning: Now they have your shriveled nuts in a razor-lined C-clamp, they want the very high interest vig on the Electoral Loan they made you to pay for your Optional War and Drunken Safety Net Shredding Good Times.

As I've been saying, the devil wants his due, and he's come to collect.

They thought they could play them forever. I guess forever is today,

 Other than a few of the names, there is absolutely nothing about this post from more than a decade ago from a long-dead blog that needs updating.

Absolutely nothing about the Right which we did not see coming and have been shouting from the rooftops since forever.

And that's a tragedy.

breezingby:

curvethemoonshine:

wow

The Connection!!!

The Deep Forger

Twitter bot employs Neural Net Art Style method to create images in the style of requested paintings:

Send me your photos and I’ll make digital forgeries in the style of famous painters. A bot powered by Deep Neural Networks and an encyclopedic database of art!

Try it for yourself here

Ten years ago today, I put the essay “Being Poor” on Whatever. I wrote the piece, as I explained later, in a rage at the after-events of Hurricane Katrina, when so many people asked, some genuinely and some less so, why many of the poor people didn’t “just leave” when the hurricane smashed into the Gulf Coast and New Orleans flooded. I wrote it not to offer a direct explanation but to make people understand what it was like to be poor, as I had been at various times in my life, and could therefore speak on with some knowledge. The piece wasn’t about how people became poor, or why there were poor — simply what it was like to be poor, and to then try to get through one’s life on a day-to-day basis.

I posted it because I had to. I was in a rage at what was happening in New Orleans in 2005, but I was also sick, literally physically sick about it, and for days I couldn’t understand why. I had no direct connection to New Orleans and there was no one there I considered a friend, and other, equally terrible disasters had hit the US before and had nowhere near the same effect on me. Ultimately I began to realize the difference this time was that I was aware how differently the disaster affected people along economic lines, and how the lack of useful planning and response to the disaster essentially punished New Orleans’ poor.

I was not of New Orleans and I was not of New Orleans’ poor. But having been poor in my life, I remembered the difficulties being poor imposes, the lack of options it offers, and circumstances it presents, when no way through is a good one. I had been there in my life, and the lack of understanding I saw radiating out from people about the situation made me sick almost to the point of vomiting. I had to do something or I felt like I would explode.

We had donated money, of course. But it wasn’t enough. So I sat down to write something, anything. What I came up with was a list of things from my personal experience and from the experience of people I knew in my life about poverty and what it was like to be in it. Later some people said the piece was a poem, and I can see that, and they might be right. At the time that wasn’t part of my thinking. I just wanted to get what was in my brain out into the world. I cried as I wrote it, putting the rage and sickness I felt into words. Then I posted it up on Whatever.

And it ended up going everywhere.

It was reprinted in the Chicago Tribune and the Dayton Daily News and dozens of other newspapers. It was linked to and pasted onto hundreds of Web sites. It was read out loud on the radio. It was shared in emails and mailing lists. Eventually it made its way into textbooks and other teaching materials. Churches and religious groups by the score asked permission to use it. In an age before Facebook and Twitter (and even MySpace, really), the piece went massively viral. I encouraged this, of course. As famously “pay me” as I am, “Being Poor” is one piece I have never taken money for. I allow it to be freely distributed and when people ask about payment, I tell them to donate to a local hunger or poverty charity. It’s meant to be shared and read, and read as widely as possible.

It continues to be read, a decade on. There hasn’t been a year since it was posted that it hasn’t been one of the most visited entries on Whatever; this year, it’s currently the third most-read piece on the whole site. Year in and year out, people find it, or come back to it. This makes me very happy.

Which is not to say that people didn’t find ways to try to pick it apart. When the piece came out, I didn’t go out of my way to note that the piece was based on my own experience, so a number of people questioned the veracity of the piece, and my right to write it. When I did make it clear that the piece was largely based on my own experience, some folks then wanted to maintain that I hadn’t really been poor, or that “American” poor is not really poor compared to the poverty elsewhere in the world, or they would focus on one particular bit in the piece and declaim how it was in some way inauthentic, therefore throwing out the whole piece. Others simply wanted to blame the poor for being poor in the first place.

There is of course not much to be done in those cases. I lived my poverty; I don’t need other people to decide whether I was poor enough for them. The American version of poverty may be “better” than poverty elsewhere, but it’s bad enough, both objectively and in context. And while I understand some people prefer to believe poor people deserve the poverty they’re in, I know it’s not true, or at the very least, is such a small part of why people are poor. I didn’t deserve to be poor when I was a child; I just was. The people I know now in poverty aren’t there because it’s some sort of cosmic or karmic justice; they work hard and try to better their lives. But the fact of poverty is: It’s a rough climb out, and a steep fall back, and it’s not as if everyone starts out in the same place.

That said, I admit to being an imperfect vessel to speak to poverty in America. I have been poor in my life. I am not now, nor have I been anything close to poor for my entire adult life. In fact I am on the opposite end of the spectrum. You can even say that in many ways my life encapsulates the Horatio Alger “rags to riches” American Dream narrative that we have embedded into our national DNA: Scrappy ambitious kid takes his chances and makes a few breaks for himself and comes out on top. It can happen to you too!

Except the thing I know that gets elided here is that I’m one of the very few “rags to riches” tales I know of. Anecdote is not data, and the data says that it’s tougher to move up the socio-economic ladder here in the US than it is in most other industrialized nations. Not impossible, and I am here to speak to that. But tougher. And I am here to speak to that too — because I know the breaks that I caught, including the fact that I got a scholarship to attend one of the best college preparatory high schools in the country, which I attended while simultaneously living in a trailer park. I was launched into the ranks of the socio-economic elite and I haven’t come back down. But I also know that not every kid in a trailer park gets the break I did, a break contingent on one school deciding to let me in, not a state or national will to make things better for poor children in general.

I have been poor, and am not. That makes me not the best spokesman for poverty. But I continue to see poverty, where I live and in the lives of people I know, and I am in a position where when I talk, people often listen. So this is a thing I will continue to speak on.

And it is a reason why I’m glad “Being Poor” continues to be part of the conversation on poverty. For what it’s done and what it continues to do, I’m proud to have written it. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever written.

tkingfisher:

So I had all these bait ponies lying around from ages past and I had this Senecio I just picked up that needed a new pot and wound up with a bunch of extra strings lying around, and I said “Self, there is an obvious solution to both problems in front of you.”

This is easy to a point and then frustrating. Take off the head, yank out the tail, cut out the mane with an exacto, leaving a reasonably large opening, cut drainage holes in the feet, stuff coffee filters in the legs to keep the dirt from falling out, and fill with a super sharp-draining perlite-and-cactus soil mix. Then just stick the strands in. Theoretically they should re-root, in practice, they will at least take a good long time to die.

Filling a pony body with perlite and cactus soil is going high on my list of Extremely Annoying Jobs, though. Use a funnel or something, otherwise you have to carefully wash the pony to get the dirt off, and anything with peat will stain on unsealed paint. I had to paint this sucker twice. (It is no epic paintjob, but I wanted to at least match the colors.)

Honestly, if I were going to do this for a gift or to sell, I would probably skip the dirt parts and just glue air plants in instead. Or use fake succulents. But some clever soul with more patience than I could probably make some very cute little multi-species arrangements.