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Ikegawa Shinji

I’m a person who has probably received more unrequested dick pics or smutty text messages than the average person, in part because I’m open about being a sex worker, in...

This isn’t a sex related post, so feel free to skip this one and rest happy knowing we’ll be back to our irregularly scheduled sex culture fascinations after this post. (You can always enjoy my new cyberpunk erotica collection in the interim.)

While covering two information security conferences for work in Las Vegas last weekend, I stayed at Bally’s Hotel and Casino, which was the location of the second conference (DEF CON 23). I’m a massive horror film fan, and occasional film reviewer for various media outlets, so I know a lot of odd details about choices directors have made when making certain films. The Shining is one of my favorites, and I’ve studied it extensively. With that in mind, Bally’s, formerly the MGM Grand, is by far one of the creepiest hotels I’ve ever stayed in.

It’s important to note that everything in this post related to films is entirely coincidental.

On the second day of my stay, a fire alarm went off sometime before I awoke in the morning, it seemed to be outside and continued for over an hour until I left my room to get in a cab and go to work at Mandalay Bay, location of the Black Hat conference. I mentioned the alarm to the cab driver, and he remarked at what a traumatic noise that must have been for people at Bally’s. When I asked why, he told me about the 1980 fire in the casino, which spread to the hotel, killing 85 people and injuring over 700. You can read the fire investigation report here.

Most of the deaths, I discovered, occurred in the North — now Indigo — tower rooms, hallways, stairwells, floor lobbies, and elevators. I noticed that the Wikipedia article seems to deliberately skirt this fact. Only a few deaths occurred in the casino, and a few others died from jumping or falling. The fire started from faulty wiring in a kitchen socket, and estimates by the Clark County Fire Department clocked the speed of the fire’s spread through the casino at 15 to 19 feet per second. Because the fire started at around 7:00 am, most guests were in their rooms (the hotel was at 99% capacity). It was a tragedy that changed regulations around fire alarms and fire sprinklers.

I was already uncomfortable about the hotel, due to a nightmare about people — or rather, human mannequins in breathing masks — watching me from a square cut in the ceiling over my bed. But that cab ride was when I realized just how much the hotel reminded me of Stanley Kubrick’s film, The Shining. Please note that there’s no way the two could possibly be related; The Shining came out in May 1980, while the MGM’s (Bally’s) fire happened in November 1980.

The MGM Grand had originally opened on the Bally’s site in 1973, and for its 7-year run, was *the* place for Hollywood stars to stay, play (lotsa Rat Pack activity), perform, and film celebrity TV shows.

Interestingly, in The Shining as Mr. Ullman tours Jack and Wendy through the Overlook, he says,

Ullman: “This place has had an illustrious past. In it’s heyday it was one of the stopping places for the jet sets … even before anyone knew what a jet set was. We had four presidents who stayed here. Lotsa movie stars.”

Wendy: “Royalty?”

Ullman: “All the best people.”

1. South Tower (Jubilee Tower) hallway color palette

The South tower was under construction when the North’s tragedy occurred. Stepping out of my South Tower (Jubilee) room and looking down the hall was when I first remembered the color palette of The Shining. Not many people realize this, but there are two separate color themes in The Shining — and they’re both inside the hotel. The color theme we remember the most is in the parts of the hotel that are occupied by hotel guests who are still alive — namely, where Danny rides his bike.

The hallway outside my room in the South Tower:

An example of The Shining:

2. The elevator doors

This color match stood out after I noticed the parity in the hallway’s coffee brown, red, and orange palette. The elevator doors in the South Tower:

The elevator doors in The Shining:

3. They both have a Gold Room

The Gold Room is the Overlook hotel’s ballroom, appearing in the film a few times in different eras. Famously, it’s where Jack — after passing a hallway lined with four huge mirrors, each of which reflects Jack’s inner psychosis seen in his facial expressions — visits with ghost bartender Lloyd and Jack “falls off the wagon.” Jack sits at the bar facing yet another mirror, covers his eyes, Lloyd appears, and Jack has a drink. After his sip, Lloyd steps aside and Jack can no longer be seen in the mirror.

The hotel was full of DEF CON attendees so I only got this shot to show Bally’s Gold Room:

The Shining Gold Room:

4. North Tower (Indigo Tower) hallway color palette

At this point, I was wondering about the colors in the North Tower, and realized that it was the “Indigo” tower — so there was a good chance it would be in blue ranges. Which bugged me, because I knew that in The Shining, the color palette for areas in the hotel where people are murdered — the realm of the dead — was in blue and mustard yellow. While the Art Deco bathtub scene, the famous “Room 237″ scene, is in greens, the rest of the murder scenes are in mustard/blue parts of the hotel. The hallway with the twins is mustard yellow with blue; the outside of the notorious “Here’s Johnny!” scene is mustard with blue (and so on).

The Twins:

North Tower color scheme, entrance to 20th floor lobby:

5. Use of mirrors and disorientation

I mentioned the mirrors in The Shining’s scene of Jack and the Gold Room. Stanley Kubrick’s use of mirrors in The Shining are widely written about, because they’re prevalent and symbolic throughout the film. The mirrors mostly reflect doors, and show characters when they’re struggling between, or succumbing to, the barriers between the living and the dead. Danny meets his “redrum” friend in a mirror; Jack’s demons reveal themselves in numerous mirrors throughout the film; we see “REDRUM” on a door in the mirror.

There’s much more with mirrors in the film, but you get the idea. Kubrick meant The Overlook to be spatially disorienting, and even physically impossible (an outside window in an inner office; stairs to nowhere, etc.), and the film’s mirrors are part of Kubrick’s intentional disorientation of the viewer.

Which is why, when out of curiosity I visited the North Tower and picked the 20th floor at random, I was a little freaked out to discover not only the color scheme, but that its guest room hallways are practically lined with mirrors (unlike any of the South Tower floors). Here, giant mirrors cover the walls, primarily reflecting doors.

But in many cases, they’re only reflecting each other — so walking down the halls, looking to left or right shows an infinity stretching and warping into a curved blackness you can’t see the end of.

Above: The round mirror is actually reflecting a full-wall mirror across from it, so the door you see on the left is actually also the door on the right.

Below: In some places, I stood in the reflection of three mirrors, and could not be seen. You can see the mirrors in front of me are reflecting the mirror behind me — but not me.

On the 20th floor, I also noticed that there appear to be room numbers missing.

I’m glad to have discovered later — and not when I was there — how many people died in the 20th floor hallways, several 20th floor rooms, its stairwell, and the 20th floor lobby. There’s a list (incomplete) of deaths and hotel areas here.

I uploaded all the full-size images from my 20th floor trip here if you want to see more photos and look closer.

The post Five ways Bally’s is like The Shining appeared first on Violet Blue ® | Open Source Sex.

“I always wanted you to admire my fasting,” said the hunger artist. “We do admire it,” said the overseer, affably. “But you shouldn’t admire it,” said the hunger artist. “Well then we don’t admire it,” said the overseer, “but why shouldn’t we admire it?” “Because I have to fast, I can’t help it,” said the hunger artist. “What a fellow you are,” said the overseer, “and why can’t you help it?” “Because,” said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and speaking, with his lips pursed, as if for a kiss, right into the overseer’s ear, so that no syllable might be lost, “because I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.” These were his last words, but in his dimming eyes remained the firm though no longer proud persuasion that he was continuing to fast.

Kafka, “A Hunger Artist”

One of the most basic ideological divisions found in political life can be measured by the extent to which someone agrees with this statement: “Rich people are rich because they work hard, and poor people are poor because they don’t.”

Now of course only a complete idiot would agree with this statement without any reservations or caveats. So no more than 30% of the public in the US, approximately. (I kid. Somewhat).

But it would be interesting to measure the extent to which people agree with it, with 1 representing a perfect correlation between “hard work” and wealth, 0 representing no correlation between the two, and -1.0 representing a perfectly inverse correlation. Since we’re on the internet here and not in the pages of Science or the University of Chicago Press it’s OK to just make up our data, so in that spirit I would bet that your average GOP primary voter thinks the correlation is .87, while your average progressive blogger is going to put that number way lower, and indeed quite possibly in negative territory.

There’s an important definitional ambiguity here though, which is, what exactly is “hard work?” I’m assuming that what people call “work” can be sorted into two categories:

(A) Something people do because, and only because, they’re paid to do it. (“Paid” here means receiving a benefit, not necessarily pecuniary in nature, to do it. I don’t like mowing the yard, and I’m not paid money to do it, but I get the psychic benefit of a neatly trimmed less than feral yard by doing it, even though I wouldn’t mow the yard absent this “payment.”)

(B) Something people do because they enjoy doing it, and would do it even if they weren’t being paid.

For the purposes of the above analysis, only (A) should count as “work,” and in particular “hard work.”

The reason this distinction is critical is that sometimes people get some sort of moral credit for “working hard” at things that they positively enjoy doing for their own sake, which is ridiculous. Academia is a particularly good place to observe various “hard workers” who are actually lazy as hell when it comes to doing any work. For example, Professor X is a very “hard worker” when it comes to his writing, which he loves, and his teaching, which he likes, but he does a lousy job on committees, he blows off office hours, he writes half-assed peer reviews etc. because he doesn’t actually like to do any of that stuff, so he puts minimal effort into it. Prof. X is the opposite of a “hard worker,” because he manages to get away with doing almost nothing he doesn’t want to do anyway, without regard to whether he’s getting paid. But he may well “work” 60 hours a week, if (B) counts as “hard work.”

Anyway, my own view is that the whole idea that there’s a strong positive correlation between hard work, properly defined, and wealth is pretty absurd. (A difficult intermediate case, conceptually, is the person who loves to make money for the sake of making money, not primarily because money allows him to buy things. That is, the person derives pleasure from the mere fact that “working hard” correlates for him with making money, because he loves the idea that he’s making money, even though he doesn’t particularly enjoy the things money can buy. So even though he wouldn’t bill 2300 hours per year proofreading financial documents if he wasn’t being paid big money to do it, he “enjoys,” in some perverse sense, proofreading financial documents at 11 PM on a Friday night because he’s “making lots of money,” not because he actually enjoys either proofreading or the consumption/leisure money can buy).

Once again we must thank the Supreme Court for telling us that Money=Free Speech and that there is no corruption or appearance of corruption in politics. Which is why it seems like really bad timing that Jon Hammes contributed $125,000 … Continue reading →

In the past, President Obama has proposed closing Gitmo only to run into the long knives of Democrats who refuse to let him actually do the job.  This time, Lame Duck Outta F*cks Obama(tm) is trying to use the executive branch to get the job done, and wouldn't you know it, the Justice Department is now saying "Wait a minute here..." A renewed push by the White House to close the prison at

Several western authors have had their names pirated by a Russian publisher that prints books about Vladimir Putin, reports the Guardian. The journalists, analysts, and authors did not write the books nor did they know about their publication. The Russian language books were published by Algoritm, a two-decades old publisher of controversial political and social content. The authors are considering legal action.

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Ink Space

Creative app by Zach Lieberman lets you create 3D doodles with your Android smartphone (and even save your results as GIFs):

Inkspace is an experimental drawing tool which uses the accelerometer on your Android device to move the drawings you make in 3d. 

The project itself it fairly straight forward you can draw, move the phone by tilting in different directions, adjust line that you are drawing, create an animated line which pulses and re-draws itself and record an animated gif of whatever you make. Double-tapping (or hitting the trash icon in the menu) clears the app.

As an artist I’m constantly thinking about new types of drawing tools, and what does drawing in the 21st century look like – ink space is research in that realm. If have a drawing basically in your hands, what does it look like to move around that drawing and experience more as a dimensional form that requires you to both draw and move.

The project is featured in Android Experiments, a new initiative highlighting creative coding on the Android platform (including smart watches).

You can find out more about Android Experiments here

You can find out more about the project (including links to free download and even the code) here

The adjunct professor population has grown rapidly over the past 40 years in the US, to the point where “non-tenure-track positions … now account for 76 percent of all instructional staff appointments” in higher education here. So, it was only a matter of time before someone recognized that there’s a demographic hiding behind that statistic, and that the demographic has needs, like healthcare, job stability — and its own trade publication.

Yes, last month, artist, writer, and editor Dushko Petrovich launched Adjunct Commuter Weekly, “the first magazine devoted to the lifestyle needs and shared interests of a rapidly growing and increasingly influential demographic,” according to the press release. Petrovich solicited interviews (with “Platinum Commuter” Sam Messer), essays (“Five trains each way means ten trains a day,” “Blur of Chobanis”), poetry, photography, sudoku, and more from a roster of “some of the world’s most illustrious adjunct commuters”; he Kickstarted the production costs to the tune of $5,157  (more than many adjuncts make per course); and on Thursday, July 30, he launched the impressively packed publication with a 20-page full-color newsprint tabloid at an event at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.

And then, a week and a half later, Adjunct Commuter Weekly ceased publication. Because of financial and time constraints.

“Adjunct Commuter Weekly is content driven, and I think that’s the underlying problem, financially. I see that very clearly now,” Petrovich told Hyperallergic. “The ads, for example — they were all free. In fact, they were stolen, screen grabbed. Maybe I should have gotten ads from Amtrak and academic publishers, but that might have jeopardized the content. I didn’t want to do that.

Presently in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Architecture and Design Galleries, This Is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good celebrates the optimistic possibilities of contemporary design, its opportunities for improving life. Acting as a dark foil to that exhibition, MoMA’s online initiative Design and Violence was an 18-month experiment in addressing the brutality of 21st-century design.

Organized by Paola Antonelli, senior curator in MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design, and Jamer Hunt, director of Parsons The New School for Design’s graduate program in transdisciplinary design, Design and Violence started in October 2013 and ended this May. In June, a print book was released. The project, which is archived online, offers a harrowing portal to the cruelty, suppression, and destructive actions facilitated by design. As the curators explain:

Design has a history of violence. It can be an act of creative destruction and a double-edged sword, surprising us with consequences intended or unintended. Yet professional discourse has been dominated by voices that only trumpet design’s commercial and aesthetic successes.

They add that in their definition, “violence is a manifestation of the power to alter circumstances, against the will of others and to their detriment.” The design objects mostly date from after 2001, when the War on Terror spawned paranoia and carnage, the internet grew as a realm of aggression, and 3D-printed guns revealed the potential threat of new technology.

Throughout the project, writers and designers like William Gibson, Maira Kalman, and Milton Glaser commented on and contextualized ideas like mountaintop removal mining, the teardrop tattoo, the conceptual Euthanasia Coaster that kills willing riders with its loops, and those increasingly ubiquitous plastic handcuffs. Camille Paglia considered the dagger-like stiletto heel as “modern woman’s most lethal social weapon,” while Rob Walker wrote that the 3D-printed Liberator gun from Defense Distributed is best viewed “not as an object but as an example of ‘design fiction’ — the practice of devising plans for or prototypes of objects and systems that, while impractical, express some critique of the present or vision of the future.”

One advantage of an online exhibition is that everything in it can have an equal profile, no matter how conceptual or small. For example, the hood is discussed almost as a symbol instead of an actual object, representing torture at Abu Ghraib and public execution. “The hood is both antiseptically technical and spectacularly horrifying,” wrote journalist Christian Parenti. “It is both practical and a highly theatrical form of humiliation. It is a direct control of the body and a micro-practice of power that reaches into the prisoner’s subjectivity by disorienting and demoralizing; stripping them of one of their most important and human faculties: the ability to see.”

Design and Violence takes the format of individual articles with comment sections that often add to the dialogue, such as one reader pointing out on the hood piece that it left out a discussion of Trayvon Martin. These also, perhaps unintentionally, reflect the hostility of this form of internet discourse design, such as the over 100 comments on the Serpentine Ramp, which was proposed by Temple Grandin in 1974 to more humanely kill cattle, directing them down a winding ramp instead of straight so they aren’t panicked by what’s happening ahead. This rumination on slaughterhouse ethics sparked far more dialogue than the moving post on lethal injection, which features an interview with Ricky Jackson, who was exonerated after over three decades in prison, including a stint on death row. That design of death, which originated in 1977, received only two comments.

Over 18 months of examining 21st-century applied design, Design and Violence considered devices of ruination as unintentional as a box cutter and as deliberate as an AK-47. The most startling message, even if it’s not directly stated, is the limits of human empathy. By curating these objects of violence both small and global in scale, Antonelli and Hunt make us realize our resourcefulness for obliteration.

Design and Violence is archived online by the Museum of Modern Art (11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan).

Today, as the art of handwritten notes gradually fades, one common way to court someone is to slide into his or her DMs. Perhaps a slightly more graceful and heartfelt tactic was the issuing of exquisitely handcrafted, paper love tokens, complete with original messages of romantic poetry, that lovers of the 18th century particularly favored. Recently, Harvard University’s Houghton Library acquired one such love token dating to the late 1700s, possibly fashioned by a New Englander. Delivered to his lady of interest in the form of a puzzle purse, it records the unrequited passions of one gentleman who signed off as “E.W.” and offers a glimpse of the intricate, artful handiwork of a bygone time.

Made of a single, one-foot square of laid paper, the love token was folded so it could form a four-inch square, with drawings and words carefully designed so the flaps form a pattern when tucked in as well as when opened. Detailed watercolor and ink illustrations of a sun and moon, hearts sprouting flowers, and a Cupid-like figure surround the verse, penned in elegant cursive. At the center are detailed portraits — presumably of the sender and receiver — and while the bright, multicolored inks suggest a carefree and blossoming relationship, the message has rather dark lines that indicate otherwise. A sampling:

Thou art / the Girl and only Maid / That hath my Tender / Heart Betray’d. If you refuse / to be my wife / You will betray me / of my Life. Pale death at last / Shall stand my Friend / And bring my sorrows / to an End. So I rest your / Lamenting Lover / Till your answer does / me recover.

The story is difficult to weave together from the rest of the lines, but Houghton Library’s Curator of Early Modern Books & Manuscripts John Overholt wrote that the writer apparently crafted the work after the woman he proposed to rejected him. The style of the puzzle purse exemplifies an American folk art tradition, and Overholt noted two other examples of centuries-old, romantic puzzle purses: one, an extremely ornate love token for a woman named Sarah Newlin, is in the American Folk Art Museum; the other, depicting a man in a wide-brim hat in a garden, went to auction at Sotheby’s last year.

Clearly this form, and certain consistent characteristics, propagated through folk culture in the northeast US in the late 18th century,” Overholt told Hyperallergic. “It wouldn’t be too farfetched to compare it to a modern internet meme.”

Both our piece and the Sotheby’s one use the motif of love growing and flowering as depicted through trees and plants, while the American Folk Art Museum item very strongly resembles ours in the way that each of the four folded points come together to form a heart, which is symbolically broken when the token is opened.

According to the American Folk Art Museum, love tokens arrived in the US after Pennsylvania German immigrants introduced the practice in the mid-18th century. The format became popular in the region and was usually highly elaborate, with many decorative elements including lace-like cutwork and common motifs such as lover’s knots and labyrinths. Another notable example belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, resembling a mandala with its fully colored, rounded surface that its maker even snipped at the edges to form a delicate pattern. Meant for the eyes of just one, such puzzle purses are impressive records of dedicated, time-consuming efforts to communicate affection, existing as literal labors of love.

In a hauntingly poignant review of Helen Macdonald’s lovely H Is for Hawk, the Los Angeles Review of Books’s Dinah Lenney writes about her own experience of loss and the turning toward the natural world:

In grief, what I found: birds reassure. Birds as representatives of a universe that will go on with or without us. I don’t mean to oversimplify. I don’t mean to underestimate our disastrous impact on the planet; our injuries to the wilderness; I don’t mean that birds don’t die, too — they do, of course. I don’t mean, I don’t mean — so what do I mean? Only that if we forget for one moment how unfathomable, how indifferent (if not impervious), how wild and miraculous is this world, we only have to look up and there they are. And they can fly.

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Janus VR - Drag and Drop

Latest update to the 3D web browser lets you create and remix 3D web pages easily, letting you drag and drop images, GIFs, videos and even 3D models into a space. In some ways, this could be the most important and creative web browser at the moment.

It should be noted that even though the browser was designed for VR headsets, you do not require one to use it (It can be operated like a single person view PC game).

Embedded below is a video capture of a session put together by The VR Bar to see these new features in action (it is nearly two hours long, but you only need to see a portion of it to get an idea of how it works):

Janus VR is available for PC, Mac and Linux, and you can find out more here

[GIFs above were put together using content created by Usagii here]

(The Rude Pundit is nearing the end of his beach adventures, like diving near a sea cave to look at beasties today, but is still managing to jam in a bloggy bit or two.)

You may have seen the photos from the protests underway in Ferguson, Missouri, for the first anniversary of the shooting death of Michael Brown. You might have seen the four white guys who are distinctly not cops but look like dudes who name themselves things like "Shotgun Jake" and "Phil the Patriot." They are members of the Oath Keepers, a bunch of bizarro fucknuts who like to walk around with their guns hanging out to remind everyone they love America more than anyone, especially you, you fuckin' commie Negroes.

The quartet of gun ghouls claims they are there to protect "reporters" from Infowars, a bunch of bizarro fucknuts led by Alex Jones who never met a conspiracy theory they wouldn't deep throat. Which would still be creepy and unnecessarily confrontational, but is even more so because Infowars told Reuters, "Yeah, no, fuck these guys. Not with us."

Faster than you can say, "Um, what would happen if a bunch of open-carrying black men said they were there to defend a BET reporter?" gun nuts jumped in to add their voices to the "Whoa, whoa, there, Shooty" opposition to the Oath Keepers' presence in Ferguson.  At the sexy-named, ultra-pro-gun site Bearing Arms, Bob Owens writes, "They interjected themselves into a community where they were neither wanted nor requested, and raised tensions instead of assuaging them."

He quotes another gun-lovin' blog, Gun Free Zone (ha, it's facetious, get it?), "Go away.  I don’t care if you really were a Ranger or if you only played one online, you are fanning the flames and making the rest of us look bad.  And before you call me a hypocrite, the Koreans on the rooftops during the LA Riots were defending their business, not patrolling the streets looking like a Blackwater contractor guarding a VIP in the Green Zone.  Go home and get out of the spotlight.  I don’t want to lose my AR because you didn’t know when to leave yours locked in the safe."

Damn. Sometimes gun-fellatin' paranoia can work in your favor. Who'd've thought?

Big Ketchup is now destroying the American working class:

In a widely expected move, Kraft Heinz is cutting 2,500 jobs, the company announced Wednesday. That amounts to 5% of the company’s 46,000 employees, with affected workers located in the U.S. and Canada.

This marks the first round of layoffs at the newly merged food giant after Heinz bought 51% of Kraft in March in a deal brokered by Warren Buffett and the Brazilian private equity firm 3G Capital. Given that management group’s reputation for aggressive cost-cutting, most observers expect more layoffs to follow.

As the AP reports, the cost-cutting process began last month with a memo to employees in which Hees told employees to print on both sides of paper (a rule Brito enacted at AB InBev as well) and to conserve office supplies. At Kraft headquarters, employees no longer get free Jell-O.

In a statement, Kraft Heinz spokesperson Michael Mullen said the cuts are part of a new structure that “eliminates duplication to enable faster decision-making, increased accountability and accelerated growth.”

Free Jello is a staple of American worker power.

700 of those workers are in Illinois.

Kraft employed about 2,000 people in Northfield before the layoffs. The 2,500 job cuts amount to slightly more than 5 percent of Kraft Heinz’s global workforce of about 46,000. Mullen declined to break down the layoffs by location but said that cuts in Pittsburgh, Heinz’s hometown, were not “material.”

Northfield village President Fred Gougler said the layoffs were expected, adding that Heinz’s cost-cutting measures served as a warning for Kraft employees after the merger.

“We were not surprised, but that doesn’t make it any easier for us,” Gougler said.

With the news, the village adds its name to a long list of local communities feeling the brunt of corporate consolidations and restructurings. Other companies with offices in the Chicago area have laid off more than 7,700 workers since the beginning of the year, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The list includes downstate companies Caterpillar and Deere, which are among the state’s largest employers. While many of the layoffs affected workers here, the 7,700 figure also includes layoffs elsewhere in the country for these companies.

There’s only one solution–boycott ketchup. It’s the only way to stand with American workers. Which side are you on?

byzantine-world:

Benjamin Constant - Empress Theodora at the Colisseum

“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan

A dad and self-proclaimed geek that lives in Cleveland, OH. Owns the @alphabet Twitter handle. Will soon become rich.

“Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear their bodies. I knew this because there was a large television set resting in our living room. In the evenings I would sit before this television bearing witness to the dispatches from this other world. There were little white boys with complete collections of football cards, and their only want was a popular girlfriend, and their only worry was poison oak.”

- Ta-Nehisi Coates, ‘Between The World and Me’

betthearm:

invisiblelad:

revolutionarykoolaid:

Last Night in Ferguson (8.11.15): Shit continues to be fucked up. The police continue to outright assault protesters and make indiscriminate arrests. A year later, the police are also no better at de-escalating tensions. And then, the Oath Keepers showed up… who the fuck and why?! Overall, nearly 150 protesters were arrested yesterday in Ferguson/St Louis. #staywoke #farfromover

If you ever want evidence of what it is to operate in a police state; where suppression of journalists, squelching of public assembly and peaceful protest are shrugged off and or encouraged by “tyranny fearing” armed militiamen who help do it… this is American dystopia. 

The human rights nightmare that was bad enough the first time. Now its just obvious that nothing whatsoever has changed. 

The police are not here to help you. At all. ever.

We need to hear from the Good Cops. Where are the Good Cops who are going to publicly stand up against this sort of thing?

futurejournalismproject:

The Best Auto-Reply

Via Elan Morgan:

When we give so much of our media space over to discussion about the irritation that is listening to women’s voices, we miss the underlying truth and strengthen an already powerful and ugly cultural bias. This ongoing, superficial public discussion about women’s speech habits is really about our resistance to listening to or featuring women in public discussion. It is not about how women need to be taught how to speak.

The bias against women in public dialog, from the complaints about the way they speak to our reticence to see them in positions of power, limits their participation in the culture and the politics that affect change not only in their own lives but also in their communities and the larger world. This imbalance has deep and broad social, political, and economic impacts for all of us, both women and men.

That is what we really need to be talking about.

Image: Screenshot of an auto-reply email created by Katie Mingle of the design — and design thinking — 99% Invisible podcast.

The company abused the Windows installer's anti-theft mechanism, which reads the firmware for executables at install-time, embedding a ton of crappy, insecure shovelware that would be added to your computer every time you reinstalled the OS. Read the rest

“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.”

- Isak Dinesen
(via seemoreandmore)

the-krakeneer:

goingtrickster:

agenderskye:

*hacker voice* anyway here’s firewall

delete this

*deletes firewall*
*hacker voice* I’m in.

via http://matthieulavanchy.com/works/etienne-gros

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The infractions she's charged with are so minor, it's hard to believe. Read the rest

On Tuesday, renowned genre writer Anne Rice took to her Facebook page to address what she calls “the new era of censorship,” joining the well-established ranks of public figures who legitimately feel that political correctness—AKA being sensitive to how your actions affect marginalized groups—is a societal ill.

Rice specifically addressed the controversy surrounding For Such a Time, Kate Breslin’s romance novel about a relationship between a Nazi concentration camp commander and a Jewish prisoner. For Such a Time was published in 2014 (and nominated that year by the Romance Writers of America for Best First Book and Best Inspirational Romance), but has gained attention online recently after a reviewer wrote an open letter condemning the book’s nominations.

According to Rice, the book’s recent attention has led Internet users to abuse Amazon’s review system:

Rice, (who has a bit of a history with “internet mobs,” herself) went on to explain that she personally has yet to read the book, but that its subject matter should be irrelevant:

I’m certainly not going to deny that the Internet can create a scary group mentality (sometimes on both sides of debates), but it’s exhausting to see influential figures continuing to get on the nonsense podium to conflate political correctness with censorship.

I understand why Rice thinks readers should at least engage with a piece of media before condemning it (although I sympathize with people who elect not to, especially with For Such a Time), but giving an ill-informed opinion about a book is not censorship; and to characterize it as such, particularly while using the phrase “lynch mob,” is ridiculous and irresponsible.

Say it with me: criticism is not censorship, even if it feels that way. And, although this obviously doesn’t need to be said, “people demonstrating understandable concern about power dynamics in a questionable romance novel” is not a lynch mob.

(via Mediaite)

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