Adam Victor Brandizzi

Do not suppose that I didn’t write, hundreds of times: the difficulty has been with the directing. I directed the letters so violently at first, that they went far beyond the mark — some of them were picked up at the other end of Russia. Last week I made a very near shot, and actually succeeded in putting ‘Earls Terrace, Kensington,’ only I over-did the number, and put 12,000, instead of 12. If you inquire for the letter at No. 12,000, I dare say they’ll give it you. After that I fell into a feeble state of health, and directed the letters so gently that one of them only reached the other side of the room. It’s lying by the side of the window now.

– Lewis Carroll, letter to Mary MacDonald, Nov. 5, 1864

Here are more healthy ideas!

L’Arrivée - Ehma

juliasegal:

We’re pleased to announce that The Old Reader will officially remain open to the public! The application now has a bigger team, significantly more resources, and a new corporate entity in the United States. We’re incredibly excited to be a part of this great web application and would like to share some details about its future as well as thank you for remaining loyal users. We’re big fans and users of The Old Reader and look forward to helping it grow and improve for years to come.

First off we want to say that it’s rare to have an application that inspires as much passion as The Old Reader has as of late. We think that’s a sign of greatness and all credit for that goes to the wonderful team that has been running the show including Dmitry and Elena. We’ve gotten to know them pretty well this past week and they are smart, honest, and passionate people. We’re happy to announce that they are still a part of the team and we hope they will be for a long time to come.  The new team will be managing the project and adding to the engineering, communications, and system administration functions.

So now for the future. The Old Reader is going to retain all of its functionality and remain open to the public. Not only that, we’re going to do everything in our power to grow the user base which will only accentuate the things that make this application special. To facilitate these improvements, we’re going to be transitioning The Old Reader to a top tier hosting facility in the United States this coming week. It’s going to require some downtime and for that we sincerely apologize, but it’s also going to mean A LOT more servers, 10x faster networks, and long-term stability. We realize that doesn’t make the downtime easy but rest assured that things are looking up.

Over the coming weeks we’ll talk more about the new team of The Old Reader. We’re looking forward to introducing ourselves and making significant improvements to this incredible application. Thanks for reading and thanks for using The Old Reader!

youngblackandvegan:

winningthebattleloosingthewar:

On the morning of September 4, 1957, fifteen-year-old Dorothy Counts set out on a harrowing path toward Harding High, where-as the first African American to attend the all-white school – she was greeted by a jeering swarm of boys who spat, threw trash, and yelled epithets at her as she entered the building.

Charlotte Observer photographer Don Sturkey captured the ugly incident on film, and in the days that followed, the searing image appeared not just in the local paper but in newspapers around the world.

People everywhere were transfixed by the girl in the photograph who stood tall, her five-foot-ten-inch frame towering nobly above the mob that trailed her. There, in black and white, was evidence of the brutality of racism, a sinister force that had led children to torment another child while adults stood by. While the images display a lot of evils: prejudice, ignorance, racism, sexism, inequality, it also captures true strength, determination, courage and inspiration.

the epitome of grace under fire

look at their faces

the faces of evil

so much respect.

Oppressed by the sexual advances of her master, 22-year-old North Carolina slave Harriet Jacobs fled in 1835 and hid for seven years in a tiny loft under the roof of her grandmother’s house nearby:

The garret was only nine feet long and seven wide. The highest part was three feet high, and sloped down abruptly to the loose board floor. There was no admission for either light or air. … The air was stifling; the darkness total. A bed had been spread on the floor. I could sleep quite comfortably on one side; but the slope was so sudden that I could not turn on the other without hitting the roof. The rats and mice ran over my bed; but I was weary, and I slept such sleep as the wretched may, when a tempest has passed over them.

She cut a tiny peephole in the roof so that she could watch her children, who lived in the house but did not know of her presence. Eventually she escaped to the North, was reunited there with her brother and her children, and published an autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, in 1861. “My body still suffers from the effects of that long imprisonment,” she wrote, “to say nothing of my soul.”

See Out of Sight.

timothyrobinsonblog:

Namir Village, Laos

Começando a montar a biblioteca do Luciano.

Melhor poema do século XXI até o momento. Desse livro aqui.

Who’s the zealot? A scholarly study of early Christianity becomes a best seller thanks to a belligerent online reporter… more»

eartha kitt, i want to be evil (by mrfnk)

O Brasil não permite o aborto. Mas, nos EUA, é legalizado há décadas. Os debates, porém, permanecem. De um lado, estão os “pró-life”, que são contrários a esta prática. De outro, os “pró-choice”, que defendem o direito de a mulher decidir se quer ter o bebê.

O limite para abortar, nos EUA, são 24 semanas. Depois deste prazo, o bebê, teoricamente, teria condições de sobreviver fora da mãe. Membros do Partido Republicano, de tendência mais pró-life, enquanto os democratas seriam majoritariamente pro-choice, passaram a defender um limite de 20 semanas para o aborto. Em alguns Estados, já obtiveram sucesso. Dos 1,2 milhão de abortos realizados todos os anos no território americano, apenas uma pequena fração ocorre depois da vigésima semana. Mas a mudança tem um simbolismo forte.

A maior parte da população americana é pro-choice. Por outro lado, uma maioria também defende o estabelecimento de um limite em 20 semanas. Em Cuba, o prazo máximo para abortar é dez semanas. Ao redor do mundo, uma série de nações já aprovaram o aborto, como o Uruguai, mais recentemente, e a Tunísia, de maioria islâmica e árabe, desde os anos 1960.

Aos poucos, aqui nos EUA, também passou a surgir um debate sobre o direito de não ser pai. Isto é, a mulher pode escolher ser mãe ou não. O homem, por sua vez, não pode abortar e no máximo consegue exercer influência sobre a mulher. Não ser pai, no caso, seria uma ação distinta. A criança nasceria, mas o homem teria o direito de abdicar de todas as obrigações da paternidade. Seria um “aborto masculino”.

E aqui ficam três perguntas – 1) Você defende o direito ao aborto? 2) Se sim, qual deve ser o prazo limite? 3) Você defende o direito de o homem abdicar da paternidade?

Guga Chacra, comentarista de política internacional do Estadão e do programa Globo News Em Pauta em Nova York, é mestre em Relações Internacionais pela Universidade Columbia. Já foi correspondente do jornal O Estado de S. Paulo no Oriente Médio e em NY. No passado, trabalhou como correspondente da Folha em Buenos Aires

A presidenta Dilma Rousseff sancionou sem vetos o projeto de lei que torna obrigatório e integral o atendimento no Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS) para vítimas de violência sexual. Segundo o ministro da Saúde, Alexandre Padilha, a atenção de forma humanizada e respeitosa, com ações como o acolhimento, apoio psicológico e profilaxias para evitar doenças sexualmente transmissíveis (DST) já eram recomendadas pela Pasta por meio de portaria.

“Esse projeto, ao ser sancionado, ele transforma em lei aquilo que já é uma política que está estabelecida em portaria pelo Ministério da Saúde, que garante o atendimento humanizado, respeitoso, a qualquer vítima de estupro. (…) Primeiro, com o acolhimento e apoio psicológico. Segundo, a avaliação e qualquer tratamento necessário de qualquer lesão física. Terceiro, medicações de profilaxias para Doenças Sexualmente Transmissíveis. E o que é recomendado pelo ministério, de medicações de prevenção, para se evitar a gravidez de mulheres vítimas de estupro”, detalhou Padilha.

Aperfeiçoamentos
Ainda foi enviado um projeto de lei para corrigir duas imprecisões técnicas. A primeira propõe uma nova redação para a definição de violência sexual, pois o texto aprovado era vago e deixava dúvidas quanto à extensão dos casos tratados pela lei. A nova redação fará referência diretamente aos termos usados no Código Penal Brasileiro. A segunda inconsistência troca a expressão profilaxia da gravidez, considerada inadequada tecnicamente, por “medicação com eficiência precoce para prevenir gravidez resultante do estupro”.

“E como eu reforcei aqui, dois artigos que foram corrigidos em Projeto de Lei são fundamentais para o esclarecimento, primeiro de que o PL é dentro do contexto da violência sexual, do estupro, e nós do governo federal não compactuamos com o estupro, porque é uma tortura, é uma violência, é um sofrimento. E nós temos que ter solidariedade, humanidade, respeito e, sobretudo, piedade com as mulheres e crianças que sofrem violência sexual”, explicou a ministra Eleonora Menicucci, da Secretaria de Políticas para as Mulheres.

» Confira

Íntegra da lei sancionada pela presidenta Dilma
Novo Projeto de Lei enviado ao Congresso
Exposição dos motivos do novo Projeto de Lei

“I have done that,” says my memory. “I cannot have done that,” says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually—memory yields.

–Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“The Act of Killing” proves Nietzsche was too optimistic. This surreal documentary, which feels more like Variety Hour in Hell, began when filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer found that it was impossible to get survivors of the brutal 1965-6 anti-Communist campaign in Indonesia to describe their experiences. He settled for what he considered the next best thing: interviews with the perpetrators. And for the reason Jean-Luc Godard gives here, that turned out to be the key to making one of the most eye-opening documentaries I’ve ever seen.

Because the killers were so proud! They boasted–and they didn’t just boast about killing Commies. They boasted about lying, labeling everybody Communist in order to have an excuse to kill them; they boasted about corruption and bare-faced bribery. They boasted about the grubbiest little crimes as well as the atrocities. They call themselves premen, a term which the film translates as “gangster” but which–as they frequently point out–is derived from the English “free man.” It covers everybody from the man who scalps tickets outside the movie theater to the man who slaughters ethnic Chinese.

Oppenheimer asked these men to reenact their killings in whatever way they wished. At first the reenactments are fairly straightforward: This is how I would loop the wire around the guy’s neck, this is where I did it. Then, as Oppenheimer would play their reenactments back for them and ask how they wanted to do it over, the scenes start getting seriously wiggy. There are Western-themed reenactments and noir-themed ones, and a glorious dance scene in front of a waterfall in which a victim thanks his killer for sending him to Heaven. There are interrogation scenes in which the interrogators still have “victim” and “pretty lady” makeup on from previous scenes. It’s a vertiginous experience which makes a lot of points–for example, the gangsters are very up-front about the fact that they are consciously modeling themselves and their techniques after what they saw in movies, the way American mobsters adopted the style of The Godfather–and makes the audience feel like reality itself is up for grabs.

The premen created an identity in which violence, lies, and self-seeking were praiseworthy. “Relax and Rolex!”, as one of them chortles. They use “sadistic” as a neutral-to-positive term. I wondered whether not only fear but also the lack of any corresponding positive identity as a survivor explained the reluctance of their victims to go on the record. The killers are often explicit about their desire to create an internal reality in which their actions were admirable: They work hard to make themselves the heroes, not the villains.

And they’re comedy heroes. There’s a lot of laughter in this movie, usually after knee-slappers like, “Now that I’m governor, I can stab him if he threatens me!” The bad guys won, and that makes them the good guys now.

But “Act of Killing” suggests that conscience isn’t always as malleable as we might like. I don’t intend to trivialize the torture and murder committed by Oppenheimer’s stars when I say that I think everybody can relate to the experience of feeling our definitions of morality, guilt, and unconscionable behavior stretch and shift so that our own sins become bearable. Conscience is elastic. Some of the men portrayed here seem to have successfully suppressed any sense of wrongdoing, and in fact view themselves as victims of a foreign human-rights establishment. But others are clearly haunted. Anwar Congo, one of the most fascinating of the premen, admits that he has nightmares and that he used to seek release in drugs, alcohol, and dancing. Another asks, “If my dad were a Communist and you killed him, I’d be upset with you. Is that normal?” (A more confident killer suggests that he should seek psychiatric help, to cure his conscience.) Reenacting his crimes brings him to a painful realization of the humanity of his victims.

This is a movie about how language creates and limits conscience–there’s a great, bizarre little snippet of debate about the difference between “cruelty” and “sadism”–about how, as one man says, “From one perspective, it’s not wrong. That’s the perspective you have to make yourself believe.” There are sentences which can’t be finished: “I’m not calling you a liar, but logically….”

And there are some scenes which are just glorious filmmaking. The transition from Congo, exhaling cigarette smoke on the set of one of his final reenactments, to Congo slowly rising on the mechanical camera apparatus, is noir genius in the Citizen Kane style. The sublimely disorienting, shocking waterfall scene is grotesque and heartbreaking.

Since the movie came out, Indonesian media have begun printing similarly brazen interviews with the 1965-6 killers. The movie snuck in under the censorship radar and, by letting the premen present their pasts in their own words and images, may have given them enough film to–figuratively, only figuratively–hang themselves. Whatever happens as a result of this movie, though, it’s a must-see: philosophically rich, visually stunning, emotionally devastating.

Follow @evetushnet

At this point we are quite confident that public The Old Reader will be available in the future, now with a proper team running it.

More details later this week.
Sorry about Monday. Again.

beczor:

overdoseonfantasy:

i just.

#so this is what old age feels like

There are many reasons to oppose tipping. Most recently, a natural experiment in two San Diego restaurants suggests that tipping actually detracts from restaurant quality.

Read The Blog Post Here »

Filhote de elefante sensualiza na praia.

cutesy:

magicalnaturetour:

Young elephant playing on a beach in Phuket, Thailand by John Lindie

phuket

Since we launched first public version almost a year ago up until March 2013 we have been working on The Old Reader in “normal” mode. In March things became “nightmare”, but we kept working hard and got things done. First, we were out of evenings, then out of weekends and holidays, and then The Old Reader was the only thing left besides our jobs. Last week difficulty level was changed to “hell” in every possible aspect we could imagine, we have been sleep deprived for 10 days and this impacts us way too much. We have to look back.

The truth is, during last 5 months we have had no work life balance at all. The “life” variable was out of equation: you can limit hours, make up rules on time management, but this isn’t going to work if you’re running a project for hundreds of thousands of people. Let me tell you why: it tears us to bits if something is not working right, and we are doing everything we can to fix that. We can’t ignore an error message, a broken RAID array, or unanswered email. I personally spent my own first wedding anniversary fixing the migration last Sunday. Talk about “laid back” attitude now. And I won’t even start describing enormous sentimental attachment to The Old Reader that we have.

We would really like to switch the difficulty level back to “normal”. Not to be dreaded of a vacation. Do something else besides The Old Reader. Stop neglecting ourselves. Think of other projects. Get less distant from families and loved ones. The last part it’s the worst: when you are with your family, you can’t fall out of dialogues, nodding, smiling and responding something irrelevant while thinking of refactoring the backend, checking Graphite dashboard, glancing onto a Skype chat and replying on Twitter. You really need to be there, you need to be completely involved. We want to have this experience again.

That’s why The Old Reader has to change. We have closed user registration, and we plan to shut the public site down in two weeks. We started working on this project for ourselves and our friends, and we use The Old Reader on a daily basis, so we will launch a separate private site that will keep running. It will have faster refresh rate, more posts per feed, and properly working full-text search — we are sure that we can provide all this at a smaller scale without that much drama, just like we were doing before March.

The private site?

Accounts will be migrated to the private site automatically. We will whitelist everybody we know personally, along with all active accounts that were registered before March 13, 2013. And of course, we will migrate all our awesome supporters and people who donated to keep the project running (if you sent us bitcoins, please get in touch to get identified). Later this week your account will get a distinct indication whether it will be migrated to the private site or not. If you see that message and believe that it’s wrong, or if all your friends are getting migrated and you are left behind — please, drop us a line.

Give me my data!

You will have two weeks to export your OPML file regardless of our decision. OPML export link is located at the bottom of the Settings page — use the top-right menu to get there. All posts that you saved for later by using Pocket integration will obviously remain in your Pocket account.

But you could…

For those who would like to start the usual “VC, funding, mentor” or “charge for the damn thing” mantras — please, spare it. We’re not in the Valley where it might be super-easy, and, after all, not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. We just love making a good RSS reader.

We really want The Old Reader to be a big and successful project, with usable free accounts. But this is not possible to achieve with what we have, so unless someone resourceful takes over the project and brings it to the next level, it is not gonna happen. We had over 2 000 new registrations after the blackout last week. This is amazing and sad at the same time.

If anyone is interested in acquiring The Old Reader and making it better, we are very open and accepting proposals at hello@theoldreader.com. We would be waiting for them for two weeks, supporting and maintaining The Old Reader as usual. Please don’t write us if you don’t have resources to maintain a site used by tens of thousands of people every day, or if you don’t know how you would improve The Old Reader. And please spare our time if you just want to buy the domain name and park a bunch of silly ads there — it’s not going to happen.

We value our community very much, and we will either pass the project to somebody who we know is going to take a good care of it, or we will switch it to private mode.

What next?

From one point of view, it’s not a big deal: “RSS is obsolete”, nobody died, we don’t owe anybody anything, you name it. Also, there are a lot of good readers around to choose from, a large part of them is smaller than The Old Reader and had not experienced growing pains of 80 000 daily active users in no time. But for us, it’s heartbreaking.

I will finally get back to work on my small studio — Bespoke Pixel — which has been run by my awesome partner all this time. Dmitry will keep being bright young software developer, making scalable and beautiful projects. Our team will stay together, and will keep working on making the private version of The Old Reader awesome.

We feel great responsibility for the project. We’d rather provide a smooth and awesome experience for 10 000 users than a crappy one for 420 000.

Sorry, each and everyone if we failed you. You are an incredible, supportive and helpful community. The best we could possibly hope for.

All the love,
Elena Bulygina and Dmitry Krasnoukhov

fer1972:

Alexander Wells