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Chris Foss

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The Hugo Awards – are we all sick to death of my posting about the Hugo Awards? Hell yes, you say? Well, can we can stand one more post on the subject? Okay, then! - are voted on in two stages. From the Hugo Award FAQ:

How are the results decided?

Voting for the Hugos is a two-stage process. In the first stage voters may nominate up to five entries in each category. All nominations carry equal weight. The five entries that get the most nominations in each category go forward to the final ballot. […]

Why do you have a two-stage system?

Hundreds and hundreds of science fiction and fantasy works are published each year. No one, not even the top reviewers in the field, can possibly read/see all of them. Other awards limit the field by restricting themselves to works of certain types (e.g. only fantasy), or by type of work (e.g. only books), or by where they are published, or by the nationality of the author. The Hugos attempt to cover the whole field. The voting system explicitly accepts that no one can have seen/read everything. It relies on the fact that many people participate to find the five works that are most popular (that is have been seen/read and enjoyed by most people), and then there is a run-off between them in the final ballot.

So the first stage of Hugo Award voting is a form of crowdsourcing, whittling down those “hundreds and hundreds” of stories to just five in each category.

For instance, in 2012 (before the puppies), 611 Hugo voters turned in ballots for short stories. The most popular short story, E. Lily Yu’s amazing The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees, was listed on only 72 of those 611 ballots (about 12%). At least 60% of those 611 ballots didn’t vote for any of the top five nominated stories.

And that’s fine. That’s how the Hugo nominations are designed to work. 611 Hugo voters, acting as individuals, each nominate whatever short stories they think are award-worthy. From that list of hundreds of short stories, the five most-nominated make it to the final ballot.

Unfortunately, it’s an easy system to game, as the Puppies have proven. If you can form a voting bloc of just 100 people who will nominate an agreed-upon list, instead of voting as individuals, that’s enough to completely overwhelm the much larger number of Hugo voters who are voting as individuals. 100 people voting for just 5 works will beat out 500 people voting from among hundreds of works.

In the case of the Sad Puppies, Brad Torgersen solicited suggestions on his blog, and then – either working by himself, or (as Larry Correia claimed) in consultation with Larry Correia, John Wright, Sarah Hoyt, and V*x D*y – chose five nominees.¹

Next year’s Sad Puppies slate – although they’re not calling it a slate – will be run by Kate Paulk. On a podcast, she outlined some plans:

For starters the word slate is not going to appear anywhere. For second [Cross talk] I am not doing a slate, I am doing a list of the most popular works in all of the various categories as submitted by people who read on any of the various blogs that will have me. And I’m going to post ultimately the top ten of each, with links to the full list of everything that everybody wanted to see nominated, and I’m going to be saying “hey if you really want to see your favorite authors nominated your best bet is to pick something of theirs from the most popular in the list as opposed to the least popular.” That is going to be what it is. I don’t care who ends up on that list. I don’t care if David Gerrold ends up being the top of the list somewhere. That’s not the point, the point is that I want to see the voting numbers both for nomination and for actual voting go up above 5,000 up above 10,000, because the more people who are involved and who are voting the harder it is for any faction including puppies to manipulate the results.

Except this is manipulating the results. Because she’s telling the Puppies to vote strategically from a common list (“your best bet is to pick something of theirs from the most popular in the list”) instead of doing what they should, which is voting as individuals for whatever works they’ve personally read and consider the best.

This isn’t as blatant a slate as Torgersen’s was – but it’s still an attempt to consolidate the votes of the Sad Puppies, from hundreds of possible stories to just a handful of choices. By the time of the final Hugo vote, there appeared to be 400-500 Sad Puppies, about 100 of whom voted strict party line. If even half of those Sad Puppies strategically choose their votes from Paulk’s “top ten” list, while the thousands of non-Puppy voters, voting as individuals, split their votes among hundreds of stories, then bloc voters will once again be able to lock out the rest of us.

If Paulk sincerely wants to participate fairly, rather than running a slate, she should ask her readers to post their recommendations (like Scalzi and others do). And then – that’s it. Don’t consolidate, don’t list in order of popularity, don’t encourage strategic voting – just crowdsource a list of reader’s favorite choices, and tell readers to vote as individuals.

* * *

Many puppies are crowing that this year’s “Best Novel” winner – the excellent, if flawed, Three Body Problem – would not have won without a few hundred puppy voters joining with the majority of voters to beat out The Goblin Emperor (also excellent, also flawed).

That’s true, but it’s also true that Three Body Problem, which was not on either Puppy slate, would not have been nominated if Marko Kloos hadn’t honorably declined his slated nomination. In other words, it’s only because the Puppies screwed up that TBP was nominated at all.

Various leading Puppies have said that they would have nominated TBP if they had read it on time – but, as it happened, none of the handful of people (2? 5? Whatever) who made the decision had read TBP.

And that illustrates exactly what’s wrong with allowing slates to choose the Hugo nominees, rather than Hugo voters nominating as individuals. A crowd of hundreds of Hugo voters, voting as individuals, wouldn’t have left Three Body Problem off the list – but the Puppy slates did.

(Actually, Kloss wasn’t the only novelist to decline a Hugo nomination this year – Larry Correia, who founded the Puppies, made a big show of allowing himself to be nominated, and then declining the nomination. Ironically, if neither Kloss and Correia had declined their nominations, then this year’s Hugo best novel would have been Ancillary Sword, a novel the Puppies loathe.)

* * *

One more point. I’ve seen several Puppies argue that the “no award” vote was gaming the awards, equivalent to how Puppies gamed the nominations.

That’s nonsense.

“No Award” didn’t beat the Puppy nominees because a minority gamed the system and locked out the majority. It beat the Puppy nominees because that’s how the majority of Hugo voters voted. When the majority votes for an outcome, and that outcome wins, that’s not “gaming the system.” That is the system.

1. It appears that Torgersen et al pretty much ignored the reader selections they solicited: “of the 16 written fiction nominees on Torgerson’s slate, 11 – more than two-thirds – had not actually been nominated by anyone in the crowd-sourced discussion.”

SEATTLE — The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) attempts to confront the nuanced subtext of its vast collection of African masks in the ambitious and delightful exhibition Disguise: Masks and Global African Art. Recognizing that museums decontextualize ritual objects from their spiritual or narrative contexts, curator Pamela McClusky states in the press release: “While masks were exported in vast quantities to become a signature art form representing the African continent in the 20th century, masquerades were left behind.”

The curators thus engage with the notion of the mask as a catalyst, an object that takes on new meaning as it is worn and performed across history. The result is a survey of two dozen contemporary artists of African origin or descent whose practices engage in some way with the notion of self-presentation or disguise. Not all of the artists have a direct relationship with a masquerade tradition, and the show’s broad focus on the African diaspora allows for an eclectic and hybrid approach that opens as many doors as it closes.

While the resulting exhibition feels a bit diffuse, it’s compelling that SAM commissioned many new works and performances, and gave 10 artists entire galleries to themselves. Right off the bat, the viewer is confronted with Sondra R. Perry’s two videos framing the entrance. Entitled “Double Quadruple Etcetera Etcetera 1 and 11” (2013), the videos show Danny Giles and Joiri Minaya dancing like a maniac, their bodies removed in post-processing to be a shimmering refraction of the white gallery walls behind them. The work is paired with a large projection from Jakob Dwight’s The Autonomous Prism Mask project — a series of glitchy digital collages framed to match the silhouettes of masks from SAM’s collection.

The exhibition’s entrance prepares the viewer for Curator Erika Dalya Massaquoi’s inclination for new media. These contemporary takes on the exhibition’s themes suggest a certain necessity for disguise in the digital age, and that the masquerade might be a central characteristic of contemporary society at large.

This postmodern sense of schizophrenia is emphasized in the next room, which features more of Dwight’s flickering video loops, as well as a series of masks from varying African tribes with a range of ritual functions. Serving, in retrospect, as an early indication of the diverse cultures African masks are often purported to represent, the works fluidly navigate and embody identities as needed or desired.

This combination of spirituality and tech-centered futurism is found scattered throughout Disguise, culminating halfway through the show in ChimaTEK Corporation’s beta launch. Guised as a tongue-in-cheek corporate venture, Saya Woolfalk’s installation of lavish, post-human Buddhist avatars promises to give “clients access to a chimeric virtual existence” through “trademarked human hybridization technologies.” Explained in a text panel and explanatory video, Woolfalk’s post-racial utopia seems inviting if we were in fact allowed to wear her characters’ vaguely Japanese, mandala-esque outfits. I was certainly captivated enough to linger, although the success of the ritual is owed in part to an entrancing segment of Emeka Ogboh’s “Egwutronica” soundtrack (2014–2015).

Integrated throughout the exhibition, “Egwutronica” is a “nonintrusive but immersive sound installation” of synthesized beats and sampled African instruments that responds in part to the works on view. Shifting the silent sanctity of the museum to a different register, the soundscapes reinforce the notion of the masquerade as existing in a kind of “paraspace,” which is described on a text panel by Sondra Perry as a realm that exists parallel to or outside of ordinary life.

A personal favorite of the show, Jacolby Satterwhite’s video “Reifying Desire 3 – The Immaculate Conception of Doubting Thomas” (2013) combines 3D animation and video to create a polymorphous world jittering with frenetic energy and digitally rendered bodily fluids. Messy yet meticulous, Satterwhite pursues an unseen higher purpose, his deliberate movements conjuring the ritualistic, regardless of whether they follow any recognizable logic or pattern. Reminiscent of “Elenu Eiye” (2001), an archetypically foolish character’s mask and costume from earlier in the show whose title means “the owner of the mouth that’s in constant celebration,” Satterwhite’s video tests the limits of the absurd, who states in an accompanying text panel that in the digital age “the new glamour is being porous and parading your errors.”

Several artists in the show explore the masquerade tradition in a critical way. Wura-Natasha Ogunji exploits the anonymity provided by the masquerade to investigate the limits of an exclusively male tradition — for example, by parading costumed women through the streets of Lagos, Nigeria in broad daylight. Zina Saro-Wiwa conversely explores the identities of the men under the masks, taking poignant portraits that serve as “a document of [her] desire to penetrate this secretive world of men.”

Much of the works’ meaning, like Brendan Fernandes’s gallery-sized meta-critique of the appropriation of Africana by the West, however, begins to dull due to viewer oversaturation and a lack of curatorial focus. Nandipha Mntambo’s interspecies self-portraits as a bovine woman are gorgeous, yet feel somehow disconnected, and Walter Oltmann’s bristly bug costumes feel entirely out of place.

The final gallery, which is filled with various photographs and drawings of masked figures, feels necessary but tiring, and the closing work, Ebony G. Patterson’s admirable “72 Project” (2012), which acts as a solemn tribute to 72 Jamaican men killed in a drug raid by US and Jamaican forces, feels like a politically-charged afterthought.

Despite something of a curatorial overreach, all of the works in the show are quite compelling in their own right, and I imagine are only brought to a higher plane with SAM’s series of performances and programming, which saw some of the artists engage with their otherwise static work through dance. Like the Nick Cave Soundsuits that are mixed with the museum’s permanent installation of masks outside the exhibition, Disguise reintroduces a sense of wonder and urgency to a collection that’s gathered some dust.

Disguise: Masks and Global African Art continues at the Seattle Art Museum (1300 1st Ave, Seattle) through September 7. 

Creepy robots were often at the heart of Philip K. Dick stories. The future is now: a company is building a realistic looking robot to haunt your dreams and it looks strikingly similar to the science fiction author. Electric Literature reports on the project from Hanson Robotics:

On their website, Hanson Robotics highlights their desire to “realize the dream of friendly machines who truly live and love, and co-invent the future of life.” Philip K. Dick’s robot, when questioned in a 2011 interview with PBS, engages in thoughtful conversation with his interviewer, and eventually provides a calm yet chilling answer to a question many of us have on our minds: Will robots take over the world, Terminator-style?

Related Posts:

• Weekly Geekery
• The Sci-Fi “Code”
• The Politics of Fiction
• The Saturday Rumpus Review of Ex Machina
• Weekly Geekery

My latest at the National Interest continues what amounts to the book tour for The Battleship Book:

In the early 1940s, the U.S. Navy still expected to need huge, first rate battleships to fight the best that Japan and Germany had to offer. The North Carolina, South Dakota, and Iowa class battleships all involved design compromises. The Montanas, the last battleships designed by the U.S. Navy (USN), would not.

Incidentally, the listed January release date for the Battleship Book on Amazon is not correct; we remain on schedule for a late September release.

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

oneterabyteofkilobyteage:

original url http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Exhibit/3455/

last modified 1999-12-06 04:23:40

In a new monthly series, we’re highlighting a few games, apps, and interactive digital experiences recommended for the art crowd. For September, here’s a simulation of an Italian Renaissance painting guild, a Surrealist puzzler, a glitchy Pac-Man, and the most thought-provoking game on junk mail yet.

Painters Guild

For: Steam for Windows
From: Lucas Molina

Painters Guild cleverly uses the guild system of art in the Italian Renaissance as a management sim, with you as the omniscient overlord tasked with encouraging Leonardo da Vinci to exceed his master Andrea del Verrocchio, and keeping patrons happy by delivering portraits and paintings on time.

“My goal is to portray how art was made during the Renaissance, including how multiple artists worked on a single painting and how most paintings were commissioned,” creator Lucas Molina told Hyperallergic. “As an art historian, this accuracy is important to me.”

Messages delivered to your guild announce pivotal moments like the death of Donatello (which benefits your Florence business in bringing over wealthy patrons like the Medici family), and sometimes the real troublesome personalities of the artists get in the way of your progress, like a rebellious Caravaggio. The game is much more focused on the business management than the actual visuals of the art, but is an enjoyable introduction into the 15th-century trials of managing artists.

---

Back to Bed

For: iOS, Android, Playstation 3, 4, and Vita
From: Loot Interactive

While Painters Guild is about the business of art, Back to Bed is all aesthetic, although it’s a beautiful one. Initially started in 2011 as a student project at the Danish Academy for Digital Interactive Entertainment, the puzzle game is now out on Playstation in addition to iOS and Android. Developed by Bedtime Digital Games and published by Loot Interactive, it’s a pastiche of Surrealism influences, with some whale-shaped trains and tentacle shapes thrown in for good whimsical measure.

As “Subob,” a dog-ish protector of a sleepwalking human named Bob, you prevent your drowsy alter ego from tumbling down M. C. Escher’s staircases, blocking the way with Magritte’s apples, and dodging bizarre Dalí-esque figures like disembodied lips. It might not have quite the creativity of the topsy-turvy Escher staircases of fellow puzzle game Monument Valley, but exploring the checkered floors of the puzzle boards is a visually captivating dreamscape.

---

Pac-Man 256

For: iOS and Android
From: Hipster Whale and Bandai-Namco

If you ever somehow played Pac-Man to level 256, you probably reached some stage of mental disintegration where a glitchy invasion of chaotic numbers made total sense. This “kill screen” that made it impossible to progress in the game inspired the new Pac-Man 256.

Rather than one screen, this Pac-Man is endless, with the rising numbers and letters below, and swarms of ghosts above. Previously, creator Hipster Whale did a similar number on Frogger with the infinite Crossy Road. As a sort of visually insane version of the 1980s arcade game, there are sometimes ghosts in deathly quartets, and one power-up allows your spherical yellow protagonist to shoot the specters with lasers. The game is free, although $8 buys unlimited credits to avoid ads, so you can play into the pixelated delirium forever.

---

Unsolicited

From: Lucas Pope
For: Online

No one can make bureaucracy profound in gaming like Lucas Pope, who follows his Papers, Please on working an immigration checkpoint with Unsolicited on the tedium of sending junk mail. Like Papers, Please, Unsolicited offers some sympathy for those who sign, seal, and send sweepstakes and charity requests to your door.

The gameplay is simple, just a matter of selecting the right forms and plugging in the appropriate information — something which might crush your soul slightly if you’ve ever worked on any sort of monotonous office paperwork. Pope created the game in 48 hours for the Ludum Dare 33 game jam with the theme “you are the monster,” and in your quest to reach the quotas, the seemingly innocuous timeshare offers progress into some intense bill collecting. And the gameplay compels you to go on, all for a few words that drip with managerial despair: “A striking performance. Others have noticed.”

As the technology for it improves and advances, light projection is becoming an increasingly affordable and accessible method for publicly telling stories or spreading messages to a large audience. In the past couple of years alone, many artists and organizations have harnessed projection in a variety of ways, from recreating lost treasures to raising awareness of extinction to protesting issues like fracking and government surveillance. For anyone interested in exploring the medium, the Center for Urban Intervention Research (CUIR) recently released its first printed book, A Manual for Urban Projection (MUP), to illustrate the potentials of projection, particularly in urban spaces, whether sanctioned or not.

Successfully funded on Kickstarter, MUP is co-authored by CUIR founder Ali Momeni and collaborator Stephanie Sherman, who draw on years of personal experience with urban projection. The 90-page book is divided into four sections: concepts that inform and motivate all types of projection actions, the human and mechanical tools involved, different designs to produce ideal projection scenarios, and a list of reading resources, both printed and online. It also includes diagrams and pages of image cutouts for brainstorming one’s own possible plans. More of an introductory guide to projection practices rather than a dense, comprehensive reference, MUP is meant to inspire newcomers and highly experienced projectionists alike to envision possible scenarios and collaborate on future happenings. The book is also pocket-sized, which makes it convenient for toting around for reference during projects.

It’s encouraging to read about the seemingly endless possibilities such a medium offers, with far less equipment than one might expect. In addition to a projector, many setups require just a computer, a webcam, and software that’s available for free. As MUP explains, although assembly requires careful planning in advance and moving equipment around may be difficult, as with any endeavor, with practice comes ease. Perhaps the most challenging aspect of urban projection — for novices in particular — is learning how to actually work the technology, but the section devoted to projection tools is detailed, covering everything from picking the right projector and projection surface to integrating a live feed to reach an even larger audience.

Beyond the basic tools, every projection setup is different and faces its own specific challenges, especially if installed in a busy and unpredictable urban setting. MUP provides 10 illustrated scenarios that form a broad foundation for projectionists to model their own arrangements on; they include instructions for setting up theater-like scenes, live interviews, and even mobile carts fitted with hardware to “leave a site swiftly when necessary” — ideal for guerrilla protests, for example.

Light projections rarely fail to capture public attention, as they play on our love for spectacles and visual storytelling. Bright and usually large, they also easily disrupt the quotidian, which makes them fitting for bold displays of public art and protest messages. Actually launching and successfully installing such a project may seem daunting, but MUP is a helpful introductory aid for anyone trying to transform public thinking through the transformation of public space.

There is nothing in this world that says “small government” more than the idea that local government officials should be able to enforce law based on whim and personal preference:

“There never should have been any limitations on people of the same sex having contracts, but I do object to the state putting its imprimatur to the specialness of marriage on something that’s different from what most people have defined as marriage for most of history,” he explained. “So one way is just getting the state out completely and I think that’s what we’re headed towards, actually. Whether or not people who still work for the state can do it without the legislature changing it is something I’m going to leave up to the courts exactly how to do it.” Paul has previously said that he is “not a legal authority on that.”

Paul’s unrealistic plan to remove marriage from the laws has been part of a strategy on his part to avoid affirming marriage for same-sex couples without actively working against marriage equality. For example, back in 2013, he said that even if states continued issuing marriage contracts, if the debate on same-sex marriage continued for another couple decades, he hoped opponents might “still win back the hearts and minds of people.”

Paul’s support for Davis’ refusal to comply with the law seems consistent with his hope that supporters of marriage equality might still be convinced to change their minds. “I think people who do stand up and are making a stand to say that they believe in something,” he said, “is an important part of the American way.”

The idea that government should get out of marriage is unrealistic, but hardly irrational. The idea that selective enforcement of law based on whim somehow follows from this idea is just weird. It becomes less weird, I suppose, in context of Rand’s need to push past 1% in GOP Presidential primary polling.

If you’d like to be extremely rich, being born extremely rich is highly useful:

“It takes brains to make millions,” according to the slogan of Donald Trump’s board game. “It takes Trump to make billions.” It appears that’s truer than Trump himself might like to admit. A new analysis suggests that Trump would’ve been a billionaire even if he’d never had a career in real estate, and had instead thrown his father’s inheritance into a index fund that tracked the market. His wealth, in other words, isn’t because of his brains. It’s because he’s a Trump.

In an outstanding piece for National Journal, reporter S.V. Dáte notes that in 1974, the real estate empire of Trump’s father, Fred, was worth about $200 million. Trump is one of five siblings, making his stake at that time worth about $40 million. If someone were to invest $40 million in a S&P 500 index in August 1974, reinvest all dividends, not cash out and have to pay capital gains, and pay nothing in investment fees, he’d wind up with about $3.4 billion come August 2015, according to Don’t Quit Your Day Job’s handy S&P calculator. If one factors in dividend taxes and a fee of 0.15 percent — which is triple Vanguard’s actual fee for an exchange-traded S&P 500 fund — the total only falls to $2.3 billion.

It’s hard to nail down Trump’s precise net worth, but Bloomberg currently puts it at $2.9 billion, while Forbes puts it at $4 billion. So he’s worth about as much as he would’ve been if he had taken $40 million from his dad and thrown it into an index fund.

In all fairness, I am compelled to observe that Trump has come out against the carried interest loophole, one of the most indefensible parts of the United States Code.

dav-19:

Pearl~

From early designs to series design

Crystal Math

jmfenner91:

“Practice”

Levitation practice with all your friends. Background was inspired by a photo I took on a hike a few months ago.