Sophianotloren

Some of you may have been disappointed.

My last post’s title started with the words “Sexy Kids”, but when you came to read it, all there was were words, statistics, graphs, analysis, more words and one poxy joke: no living, breathing, two-dimensional, jpeg-ed ‘sexy kids’ in sight! Not a single photo like this one:

Well, as those who are insincere in their apologies say “I apologise for any disappointment I may have caused”.

But I’m giving you ‘reluctant readers’ a second chance.

Here’s a boiled-down, dessicated, fat-free, crap-excised version of the original post. Its original 2595 hand-counted words ruthlessly rendered down to a more manageable 1620.

Oh – and to entice you across the still-somewhat-harsh Arctic territory of this post, and reward you with regular fragments of metaphorical Kendal Mint Cake, I’ve hidden photos of sexy kids throughout the text – the further in you go they get hotter they get.

However, they also become progressively more cunningly concealed; only a true virtuoso at ‘ferreting out the filth’, at ‘dredging up the dirt’, at ‘smelling out the smut’ could find the last one without resorting to viewing the Page Source! (There are 9 hidden images altogether. I think.)

So here goes – the tl;dr version of ‘Sexy Kids: could this be the real cause of Paedophilia?‘

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When a friend sent me the details of a poll conducted on a darknet site run by and for paedophiles I was reminded of the following joke:

“What is the number one cause of paedophilia?”
“Sexy kids.“

The results of this poll suggest that this may be less of a Joke and more of a Statement of Fact, depending on whether by ‘sexy’ one means “provoking sexual interest” or “feeling sexually aroused or sexually active”.

The Poll

The introduction to the poll reads as follows:

“Did you have sexual experiences as a child? Were they with other children or with adults, or both?
I’m hoping this poll will address the “children-who’ve-been-‘abused’-grow-up-to-be-paedophiles” concept.
As we’re nearly all paedos here it might be interesting to see how many of us did have significant sexual experiences as children and how many of those were with adults.”

A total of 81 respondents replied as follows (click on image for full-size version):

evaluating the poll

81 respondents is a small sample, though large enough to give some significant results, especially where there are large differences in the responses to certain variables.

The sample was clearly not a random one. Here we encounter a problem with any research into a stigmatised population. Is it even possible, given the secrecy we have to live with, to get a random sample of paedophiles? A sample of darknet paedophiles is undoubtedly a more representative one than the usual ‘prisoners and/or offenders’.

An inherent bias in surveys that draw on remembered events is that the events recorded in the poll are, by definition, ‘memorable’. Non-memorable won’t figure in this poll. This will bias the poll towards more intense and spectacular sexual events that took place in later childhood, and away from events which were ‘mild’ and/or which happened in early childhood or infancy.

Nowhere is the word ‘child’ defined. ‘Child’ could be interpreted as either a prepubescent or an adolescent.

For a poll interested in determining the validity of the idea that “children who’ve been ‘abused’ grow up to be paedophiles” this could be a very significant problem since concepts of ‘innocence’ and asexuality means that society considers the effects of adult sexual interactions with prepubescents to be much more traumatogenic than those with adolescents. How many of the respondents who chose one of the ‘yes’ options in this poll were thinking of experiences they had during adolescence?

interpreting the data

Let me give each group an abbreviated label:

n: 10 (12.3%) – no
nr: 09 (11.1%) – not really (i.e. very mild experiences that hardly qualify as ‘sexual’ – such as ‘looking’, kissing, cuddling…)
ym: 12 (14.8%) – yes, but only with myself
yc: 37 (45.7%) – yes, with other children
ya: 02 (2.5%) – yes, with (an) adult(s)
yac: 11 (13.6%) – yes, with both (an) adult(s) and children

Two things about this poll that leap out at me:

i – only 16.1 % (ya + yac) of respondents had any sexual contact with adults during their childhood; only 2.5% (ya) conform to the stereotype of ‘lone innocent child being abused by an adult’, the other 13.6% (yac) also engaging in sexual activities with their peers.

ii – Depending on how we collate the data 74.1 % (ym + yc + yac) of respondents had experiences of child sexuality during their own childhood. This figure could be raised to as much as 85.2% if we also include those respondents who polled ‘not really’ (ym + yc + yac + nr).

60.5% (ym + yc) to 71.6% (ym + yc + nr) of respondents had some sort of sexual experience independent of any adult involvement.

These statistics suggest two hypotheses:

i – that childhood sexual experiences with adults don’t predispose a child to becoming a paedophile when s/he grows up;

ii – that what does predispose someone to becoming a paedophile when s/he grows up are childhood experiences of child sexuality (whether of their own or that of other children).

How do the results of this poll compare to similar surveys of the general population of adults?

re hypothesis i – that childhood sexual experiences with adults don’t predispose a child to becoming a paedophile when s/he grows up:

The following table comes from the NSPCC-commissioned report by L. Radford et al (2011) Child abuse and neglect in the UK today” (p8). It provides us with two relevant statistics (click on image for full size version):

According to the table about 0.5% of children aged 11 and under experience ‘contact sexual abuse’ ‘as defined by the criminal law at some point in their childhood’ (which we can treat as being equivalent to paedo-poll’s ‘sexual experiences with an adult‘, given that the NSPCC consider all and any child-adult sensual intimacy as ‘abuse’).

The paedo poll has about 15% of ‘children’ experiencing sexual contact with an adult’. The general population has a rate of 0.5% if one defines ‘child’ as ‘prepubescent’ and 5.3% if you define it as ’17 or younger’.

re hypothesis ii – that what does predispose someone to becoming a paedophile when s/he grows up are childhood experiences of child sexuality (whether of their own or that of other children):

I have to confess to having struggled to find any useful statistics relating to the incidence of child-child sexual interactions.

To myself, who had a disappointingly sex-free childhood (as did just about everybody else I’ve known well enough to discuss such matters with), the idea that possibly three-quarters to five-sixths (i.e. the results of the paedo poll) of the general population have some kind of memorable prepubescent sexual experience (or ‘experiences’) with either another child, other children or alone, seems hard to believe. My impression is that for the general population this figure would be much, much lower indeed.

The following extract from from “Normative Sexual Behavior in Children: A Contemporary Sample.” (Friedrich, Fisher, Broughton, Houston, Shafran) offers us an insight:

“Retrospective self-reports have also been used to understand normal sexual behavior. Lamb and Coakley [in “Normal” childhood sexual play in games: differentiating play from abuse.” (1993)] interviewed female undergraduates about their recollection of having participated in sexual play as a child (mean age = 7.5 years, standard deviation = 2.0). Of particular relevance to research with the CSBI is the fact that 14% reported kissing another child, 26% reported exposing themselves, 15% reported genital touching while clothed, 17% reported unclothed genital touching, 6% reported using objects in or around genitals, and 4% reported oral-genital contact. (For some of the above behaviors, parents reported an even higher frequency on the CSBI, ie, 38.4% of parents reported their child had touched their genitals in the previous 6 months. This would suggest that for some behaviors, parents may be more valid reporters, particularly if rating behaviors contemporaneously.) The more often the sexual games involved a cross-gender experience, the more likely the game was perceived as manipulative or coercive”

The statistics don’t give us much to work with since, for example, we don’t know to what extent it’s the same kids doing the ‘kissing’ as are doing the ‘exposing themselves’. But what is clear is that even if we take the maximum statistic reported (“parents reported their child had touched their genitals in the previous 6 months“) the percentage is still only 38.4% for this very mild sexual activity (though it’s not clear whether by ‘their’ they mean the parent or the child) – way below the 74.1 % to 85.2% of respondents who had child-centered childhood sexual experiences of some sort in the paedophile site poll.

conclusion

It appears that:

i – there’s a correlation between having memorable experiences of child sexuality during childhood and growing up to have paedophilic desires.

ii- That the “children who’ve been ‘abused’ grow up to be paedophiles” hypothesis can only explain, at very best, 15% of instances of paedophilia in the poll.

Of course ‘correlation’ doesn’t equal ‘causation’. Maybe those people who had memorable sexual encounters as children are people who are just more sexual, or the childhood encounters could be a sign that they already felt an unusually strong sexual interest in children, even when they were children themselves.

However there is a certain simple logic to the idea that those adults who know from personal experience that children are sexual beings will be informed with that knowledge and experience as they grow up, and may be more resistant to Society’s anti-child-sexuality hegemonic ideas, and thus be predisposed to paedophilia..

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find me!

So “what is the number one cause of paedophilia?”

Whilst there’s no doubt that ‘sexy kids’ (if by ‘sexy’ we mean “provoking sexual interest“) maintain us as paedophiles,.it may well be that ‘sexy kids’ (if by ‘sexy’ we mean ‘sexually active’ or ‘experiencing sexual feelings’) are what also made us paedophiles in the first place.

(Oh – and did you find the pic of the little girl in high heels and the pearl necklace?)

Sum of the Arts is a periodic tabulation of numbers floating around the art world and beyond.

• Years Botticelli fell out of fashion after his death in 1510 = 250
• Percentage of the streets in Paris named for historic women = 2.6
• Seconds London’s Big Ben clock has been running fast this month = 6
• Percentage of the US coastline covered in concrete = 14
• Number of abandoned baby carriages artist Nari Ward found on the streets, which he later installed in an exhibition about motherhood at Milan’s Palazzo Reale = 280
• Pounds of unsalted O-At-Ka Butter in the 2015 New York State Fair’s crowning butter sculpture, which includes the Statue of Liberty and Niagara Falls = 800
• Number of messages in bottles thrown by a scientist into England’s North Sea between 1904 and 1906 = 1,020 (one of which was discovered this month, the oldest message in a bottle ever found)
• Gallons of water in the on-stage river for the dance-theater performance Pearl at Lincoln Center = 4,200
• Number of people Olafur Eliasson estimates will cross his new five-platform Cirkelbroen bridge every day in Copenhagen = 5,000
• Tons of copper ore buried beneath the ancient ruins of Mes Aynak in Afghanistan = 12,500,000

nortnic:

c0ffeekitten:

When I die I want my heart donated to NASA so they can finally see what a black hole looks like up close

electricsed:

aliceismywonderland:

haleybaley901:

justkody:

pinkcupcake123:

Jacob’s Well - Wimberley, Texas

hey kids let’s all go jump into the pits of hell

This is the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.

People have actually died in Jacob’s Well, but not just from jumping, you’re too buoyant to really go down far.

But Jacob’s Well draws a lot of scuba divers, and some of them have gotten lost and run out of air. Some of the bodies have never even been found, because the underground river that feeds Jacob’s Well is so complex. I find that terrifying.

I’ve been there. You have to be careful because coming back up from too far and you get stuck under rocks trying to find the surface.

Wow look at that giant hole of NOPE.

I’m horribly pleased.

The book will be on sale in November!

Palestinian artist booted from Banksy’s Dismaland for anti-Israel protest:

tamarrud:

actualpalestinianunicorn:

wanderlustonempty:

THE IRONY LEVELS ON THIS. 

HAHAHAHA 

So what was all that shit in Palestine banksy?

oh my god 

artist Shadi Alzaqzouq: “I found out when arrived at the show that three Israeli artists were taking part, one of whom served in the IDF. I got upset that I hadn’t been informed and tried to complain to the organisers. I was told someone would meet with me but after over an hour of waiting no one came to meet with me,” .

“I decided I had to protest in some way so I went and got a bed sheet from my hotel room and wrote ‘R.I.P Gaza: Boycott Israel’ on it in coal and hung it over my artwork and laid down like a corpse in front of my two paintings on display,”

After half an hour security guards approached Zaqzouq to inquire about what was going on, who then called Holly Cushing - believed to be Banksy’s manager.

After explaining to Cushing the reason for his protest, she told him it was too “ugly” for the dark show and that an American art collector was going to buy his art - and that America and Israel were one and the same, according to Zaqzouq.

Cushing then claimed that Banksy wanted the Palestinian artist’s work to be taken down from display.

just………………….

UPDATE, 8/29/15: Donations top $10,000! The audio is up!

UPDATE, 8/28/15: As of 1pm today, the donations to Con or Bust — not counting my $500 matching gift — are $6869.17. Which is, uh, more than the $2,500 goal! Whoo-hoo! The audio has been recorded, and will be released Monday.

Now we are going for:

STRETCH GOAL: If the donations to Con or Bust reach $10,000 by 11:59 (Eastern) Sunday, August 30, 2015, I will commission or write a ditty with the title “John Scalzi is Not Very Popular,” in which my various perfidies and shortcomings are to be enumerated — in song! You know you want this to happen. So keep donating!

Plus: If the $10k is reached today (Friday, 7/28), I will release the audio as soon as we hit that goal line.

And now, the previous version of this entry, which explains everything prior to the update:

Short version: To benefit Con or Bust, a charity which helps fans of color attend science fiction and fantasy conventions, I will make an audio version of John Scalzi Is Not A Very Popular Author And I Myself Am Quite Popular: How SJWs Always Lie About Our Comparative Popularity Levels, a parody of an actual book by a certain obnoxious bigot who is obsessed with me, if $2,500 is raised for Con or Bust by 11:59pm (Eastern), Sunday, August 30, 2015. You can donate to Con or Bust here. To goose the giving, I will gift-match for the first $500 in donations.

Somewhat Less Short Version: So, there’s an obnoxious bigot who is obsessed with me who the other day released a poorly-edited ebook on the subject of “social justice warriors” and how generally horrible they are, and allegedly (as I have not read the work), I am featured in the ebook quite a lot, because, again, the obnoxious bigot who wrote the book is obsessed with me.

So “Theo Pratt” wrote a parody of the ebook, entitled John Scalzi Is Not A Very Popular Author And I Myself Am Quite Popular: How SJWs Always Lie About Our Comparative Popularity Levels. Here’s the writeup on it:

Everyone knows that SJWs always lie, but few know why they lie, or at whose bidding, or for whose benefit. While other books may claim to tell you how to take down the Thought Police, only one book is taking the fight right to the top.

Yes, from the mind that brought you the popular blog feature Sad Puppies Review Books comes this definitive takedown of the internet’s culture of Social Justice as embodied by the man who controls it all:

JOHN SCALZI.

Read this book to learn everything you need to know about Social Justice Warriors, their tactics, their treachery, their perfidious entryism. Topics include:

* John Scalzi’s blog is not that interesting and no one reads it.

* John Scalzi does not understand satire as much as I, Theophilus Pratt, understand satire.

* John Scalzi did not get me, Theophilus Pratt, kicked out of the SFWA.

* John Scalzi’s deal with Tor was not a very good deal.

And more!

I love it already.

Basically as soon as its existence was made public, people started asking me to do an audio version of it, because that would be meta, wouldn’t it. And (with the permission of “Theo,” aka Alexandra Erin), I said fine — if doing so could have a positive benefit. In this case, raising money for Con or Bust, a charity which works to bring fans of color to science fiction and fantasy conventions (and yes, donations are tax-deductible in the US*).

So, the deal: If Con or Bust raises $2,500 by by 11:59pm (Eastern), Sunday, August 30, I will create the audio version of the John Scalzi Is Not A Very Popular Author And I Myself Am Quite Popular. And because I’d actually like to do it, because I think it would be fun and because I like the charity, I will gift-match for the first $500 in donations. You can donate by going here.

Questions!

Is this like a Kickstarter? 

No! You’re straight up donating. If we don’t make it to $2.5k, your donation will still go through. So you’ll want to encourage everyone you know to donate so you get the audio. There’s risk! But I suspect we can between us cough up $2.5k in three days, no?

If this succeeds, where will the audio be? 

I’ll post it up here. The ebook is fairly short (28 pages) so it’ll be a manageable file size.

How will you accomplish this mighty task?

I have a microphone and recording software. It’s not rocket science.

When will the audio be ready?

Probably very soon afterward, because it’ll be short.

Why Con or Bust?

As I said, it’s a worthy charity with admirable goals, and also it’s run by people I know and trust.

Blah blah blah something something just giving the obnoxious bigot oxygen blah blah.

Whatever. This is a fun way to help foster diversity in science fiction and fantasy fandom while making fun of a jerk. I’m in.

Thanks and let’s do this thing!

* It’s been suggested that the Carl Brandon Society, under whose umbrella Con or Bust works, let their tax-deductible status lapse. I’ll check into that. That said, Con or Bust is run by Kate Nepveu, who I’ve known for years and who I know has the best of characters. Your money will go to where she says it will. Remember, I gave $500 of my own money. I have no doubt it will be well spent.

tuttifuckinfruittyyy:

The Nymph of Amalthea, 1780s

Submitted by Celina / Cedric, the model and photographer.

“This collage is part of my finals art project. I chose gender roles as my topic, especially so, as I’m trying to find out if I’m trans or genderqueer right now.
You can see me wearing all bras I ever owned in pretty much the chronological order I bought them in. What I wanted to enact was a a transformation from typically female to typically male traits but it occurred to me in the making, that that’s exactly my own transformation and my own journey, that I seem to have been on longer than I realized.”

moviebarcode:

Enemy Mine (1985)

The Bechdel Test has a new name: the Bechdel-Wallace Test. Cartoonist Alison Bechdel popularized the test for assessing films on their portrayal of women. To pass, a film must contain a scene with two female characters talking to each about a subject other than men. (Few films pass.) However, while Bechdel popularized the test through a comic, its origins are with her friend Liz Wallace, and Bechdel wants to share the credit.

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• Narrative Dependencies
• If Trees Could Touch-Type
• Economy of Language
• Competitive Writing

Sometimes, it's the easiest thing in the world to figure out just how dumb a person is. For instance, here are two sentences from a letter from Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, the world saddest animated giraffe, to President Barack Obama regarding Obama's visit to New Orleans today to mark the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Jindal didn't want Obama to mention climate change:

"While you and others may be of the opinion that we can legislate away hurricanes with higher taxes, business regulations and EPA power grabs, that is not a view shared by many Louisianians.

"I would ask you to respect this important time of remembrance by not inserting the divisive political agenda of liberal environmental activism."

Can you wrap your head around that without it exploding? After attacking the President politically, Jindal asks Obama not to bring up something "political." You got that? Put aside for a moment that bringing up something that pretty much every scientist accepts as fact isn't exactly "political," how the hell do you take two completely contradictory sides without getting whiplash? It's like Jindal sucker punched Obama and then said, "I ask you not to throw punches because that'd be mean." That's not just dumb. It's pathologically, insistently stupid.

Jindal continues, "Furthermore, the people of Louisiana have already agreed upon a pragmatic and bipartisan approach to preventing and mitigating the damage of future weather systems." Yeah, sure (although the usefulness of that plan has far less support than the reality of climate change), but who exactly is financing all the plans? It sure as shit ain't broke-ass Louisiana. Oh, right, it's funded by the billions of dollars that came from the federal government.

In other words, who the fuck cares what Bobby Jindal wants said?

Towards the end of his letter, which is about as a effective as a flea fart in a hurricane, Jindal smirks, "Partisan politics from Washington, D.C. are unwelcome in Louisiana at the best of times. This week it would be met with nothing but derision."

Huh. Before his speech today, Obama had given an interview to WWL-TV where he said, "We can build great levees. We can restore wetlands. But ultimately, what we also have to do is make sure that we don't continue to see ocean levels rise, oceans getting warmer, storms getting stronger." And yet all the people at his speech didn't react with derision, unless hugs and tears are now an indication of contempt.

That's because the people of New Orleans know better than Bobby Jindal what the deal is. They know that without any real action on climate change, the city is fucked beyond fucked, and all the mitigation and restoration plans will mean jackshit. Yeah, that mighty plan Jindal touted was based on "low-balled" estimates of the effects of climate change when the what's really predicted to happen is that shit's gonna get drowned by, perhaps, 2062. Says one scientist, what we do about carbon emissions in the next 30 years "will determine whether New Orleans is inhabitable during the 22nd Century."

But let's not taint the whole memorial with politics. It'd be unseemly.

“The countercultural trickster has been pressed into the service of the preppy tech entrepreneur class. It began innocently, no doubt. The association of the hacker ethic with startups might have started with an authentic counter-cultural impulse on the part of outsider nerds tinkering away on websites. But, like all gentrification, the influx into the scene of successive waves of ever less disaffected individuals results in a growing emphasis on the unthreatening elements of hacking over the subversive ones.”

— The Hacker Hacked, by Brett Scott

Ever since I read Brett Scott’s engrossing piece on what he refers to as the “gentrification of hacker culture” I’ve been thinking about how this idea might apply to the world of civic hacking. The lament about the loss of the subversive nature of hacking resonates—Scott repeatedly uses this word in describing the origins of hacking and its focus on being antiestablishment and decentralized.

Civic hacking became popular in the last several years via municipal app contests like Apps for Democracy and NYC Big Apps, and then by community-focused events organized by local groups. Often these local events have benefited—and continue to benefit—from the direct participation of local governments and other government entities.

Back in 2011, one of the first civic hacking events I helped organize in Philadelphia was focused on transit data, and the event ultimately included the participation of the local transit authority. I even talked about the benefit of having representatives from the transit authority on hand at the event in subsequent interviews.

Participation in civic hacking events by government employees is something I helped to advocate for after I joined the City of Philadelphia as Chief Data Officer. I regularly attended civic hacking meetups and weekend hackathons, and encouraged others in city government to do so as well. I’d say it’s pretty common now in most cities with a developed civic hacking community to have regular, visible representation from government at civic hacking events.

But civic hacking did not always have such a cozy relationship with government.

Many early civic hacking projects grew out of frustration with the quality of public services and the lack of available data from governments. One of the earliest civic hacking projects in the Philadelphia area—which helped to inspire the transit hackathon I would later organize—was born out of frustration over the lack of easy-to-access transit schedule data from the regional transportation authority.

These early civic hacking projects often used FOIA requests or web scrapers to obtain data that governments were reluctant to open up, and some even drew the ire of the government lawyers.

The “subversive” nature of civic hacking continues to this day through the work of people like Carl Malamud and others. It would be unwise to forget the many institutional barriers that still exist to releasing open data from government, and collaborating effectively with outside parties.

A little subversion is still necessary.

There is much to be gained by building bridges between the world of civic hacking and government. There is a long history of volunteerism to help government in this country, of which civic hacking can be viewed as a contemporary extension. Engaged civic hackers can help build solutions that help governments deliver services more effectively, and increasingly the civic hacking community has been looked at as fertile ground for recruiting new government employees.

But is there a risk that the civic hacking community will become gentrified? Has it already become so?

Do civic hacking groups that work regularly and closely with government officials feel empowered to ask tough, direct (often uncomfortable) questions about data releases and procurement practices? Do groups that collaborate regularly with government feel that they have standing to hold public officials’ feet to the fire when needed?

How do we balance the relationship between civic hackers and governments in a way that can realize the potential benefits of “government as a platform” and that is also true to the subversive roots of civic hacking?

I don’t have the answers, but I hope others are open to having this discussion.

This post originally appeared on Mark Headd’s blog Civic Innovations.

The post The Civic Hacker Hacked appeared first on Civic Hall.

Video Segmentation

Online service from Georgia Tech and Google breaks down videos into areas to create data for annotating objects within it (for example, for computer learning).

It also has an interesting visual look, and with a suggestion from stallio I processed FKA Twigs ‘Pendulum’ music video (note - the output video is silent, the original video is embedded below it):

The Video Segmentation Project has been a collaborative effort between Georgia Tech and Google Research to put a state of the art segmentation and annotation system online for other researchers to use. In addition to making this system available online, we have made all of our source code open source and therefore available for you to use if our system does not fulfill your specific needs.

To upload video, you will need a Google account and probably a lot of patience while it renders.

You can find out more about the project here

If you’re not making enough money, or if you’re stuck in a dead-end job that you’re overqualified for, it’s because you just aren’t hustling hard enough. It most certainly is not because there aren’t enough jobs, or the minimum wage isn’t high enough, or because women aren’t guaranteed equal pay under the law. Even if those things may be true, hustling makes them irrelevant.

Colette Shade on the problem with the commodification of “the hustle.”

Related Posts:

• The Best Job You’ll Get With That Degree
• Romance Writers Mean Business
• Bending Gender to Make a Sale
• How to Build a Joan of Arc
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hedgeworth:

Seeing will.i.am’s name translated into another language as though it were Will, I Am and not just William is fucking hilarious. 

No supergroup rumors here (sadly), but both delivered performances this week that you may have missed. First, Grace Jones killed it at the Afropunk festival, topless, in full body paint, and wielding a hula hoop through the entirety of “Slave to the Rhythm.” A crowd member did us all a favor by catching a short clip of the performance, which you can watch via Dazed Digital.

Then, in a truly NPR moment, after being played between segments on countless episodes of NPR’s Morning Edition, Yo La Tengo finally came to play as the show’s house band for a day. Videos of the performance are up alongside the show’s segments on NPR’s website, along with the transcript of their interview discussing the upcoming album, Stuff Like That There, coming out on Matador tomorrow.

Related Posts:

• It’s Not Too Late: Summer’s Best Free Shows
• Grace Jones Memoir Actually Happening
• New Music from Thao & The Get Down Stay Down
• Sound Takes: Heaven
• This Week in Posivibes: FKA twigs

From the entrancing Micro Universe Tumblr: a bacterium on a diatom on an amphipod.

Instagram has broken its self-imposed mold and is now allowing users to bypass the square photo format in favor of landscape and portrait-oriented images. No longer will you be forced to crop out those on the margins of your group photograph or create images with distracting white borders to ensure your followers see the whole picture. Yes, the Facebook gods have heard your cries!

The adjustment is sure to please print media publishers, professional photographers, and the movie industry, all groups that tend to shy away from the square format.

The Star Wars account has already uploaded a clip from the highly anticipated upcoming film in the new landscape format. You can see why Instagram changed its policy to make it more friendly for content producers like Hollywood — the frame now captures the whole scene without feeling like you’re missing out. The change may also be a nod to Hollywood’s power, since its ad dollars and celebrity power are sure to be a growing force on the image-sharing platform as they turn to monetize the app and capitalize on mainstream interests.

There has been an awakening… #StarWars #TheForceAwakens

A video posted by Star Wars (@starwars) on Aug 27, 2015 at 10:00am PDT

This isn’t the first loosening of Instagram’s once notoriously strict posting policies. Earlier this month Hootsuite announced that you can now schedule posts on Instagram, making the app a little less “insta” but better for institutions and brands interested in ensuring that their messages go out in smoothly timed intervals.

While these changes may make Instagram easier to use, they do chip away a little at what we’ve come to see as the app’s distinct aesthetic.

The new version of Instagram (v.7.5) is available in Apple’s App Store and Google Play.

Goodbye Unfollower

Web app from Adult Swim sends out a poem to anyone who unfollows you on Twitter.

More Here

Above: Pittsburgh, 1940

I was on The Union Edge on Tuesday, the great labor radio program out of Pittsburgh, talking about Out of Sight and other labor-related matters. You can listen to it here.

My Pittsburgh visit was also highlighted by not only meeting wjts, but not getting into fisticuffs with him over condiment choices. I was proud of myself.

Canon is bringing its latest mirrorless camera, the EOS M3, to the US after all. The Japan-based manufacturer announced this compact shooter back in February, but now people in the States will have a chance to get their hands on it. A follow-up to...

To the untrained eye, LG's new Bluetooth keyboard looks like a (very long) mobile battery, but that's because it's all bundled up. Unfurl the Rolly and you'll get a "full-size" keyboard that automatically switches on and connects to your nearest (LG?...

good translation

railroadsoftware:

zuzu-and-friends:

This picture is cool but that fucking dudes face at the bottom

he’s hype

“When they saw me in my space suit and the parachute dragging alongside as I walked, they started to back away in fear. I told them, don’t be afraid, I am a Soviet citizen like you, who has descended from space. And I must find a telephone to call Moscow.”

-

Yuri Gagarin,

the first human to travel to space; upon re-entry Gagarin landed 280 kilometers away from the intended landing site, to the surprise of a farmer and his daughter who watched him fall from the sky (via

whats-out-there

)

HELLO FELLOW CITIZENS I AM A CITIZEN JUST LIKE YOU DEFINITELY NOT AN ALIEN NOW TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADERS

(via currentboat)

where are your nuclear wessels?

(via springsnotfail)