firehose

macho man wanted to be cremated when he died and he wanted his ashes to be spread around his favorite tree, where the ashes of his beloved dog, hercules, were spread. he used to always say “if it’s good enough for herc, it’s good enough for me!”

FiveThirtyEight tested the 10 fastest rappers according to Rap Genius to see whether their rankings were justified.

The Russian government warned U.S. authorities that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a violent radical Islamist more than a year and a half before the April 2013 bombing, but he slipped by authorities undetected because someone had misspelled his last name in a security database.

Apple hoped to make an impact with a big ad on the New York Times website and it did — for the wrong reason.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that an unsustainable debt burden soundly tolls the death knell of a nation’s economy, and its government. Unfortunately, it can sometimes take a rocket scientist to figure out what the real numbers are.

A 10-week course

Jean & Scott, Episode 7 by Max Wittert

(Twitter: TallBlondNRich / Instagram: FionaSnapple)

See previous episodes:

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Episode 5

Episode 6

FireChat is an iOS chat app by developer Open Garden that uses the Multipeer Connectivity Framework built into Apple’s iOS 7 software to circumvent the need of Internet or mobile phone coverage when sending images or text. Essentially, the app makes use of this peer-to-peer Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capability to connect devices together without the need for a connection of that kind. The app works best in this “Nearby Chat” mode when within 30 feet of other users, and is currently available in Apple’s App Store.

via Cult of Mac

Mercenary Kings out today, put this trailer in your face ⊟

Watch this Mercenary Kings launch trailer once and pay attention to the animation. Then close your eyes and run it again, and pay attention to the music. Like, everything about this is top tier.

If you have a PC or Mac that can run games, lucky you! You can get it today for 25% off! You might want to hang onto the Mac version for a bit before getting too emotionally invested, though: “We’ve found a game-breaking bug in the MAC version and we’re working on fixing it ASAP, hopefully later today.”

BUY Mercenary Kings, upcoming games

nothing-but-a-hiddlesbatch-thang:

When one of my family members asks why I don’t have a boyfriend

tastefullyoffensive:

[brittskyy]

fuckyeahhistorycrushes:

starberryboos:

"ey touch my bongos"

i am still laughing at this i am so sorry
i just rly want to share it with you all
its important history

The new NASA-JAXA precipitation satellite works! The spacecraft was launched in February as part of an effort to improve global rain and snowfall measurements. You can see its first images, which are of a cyclone east of Honshu Island, Japan.

Read more...

Rendering was never the point.

Oh, it’s hard. But it’s rapidly becoming commodity hardware. That was in fact the basic premise of the Oculus Rift: that the mass market commodity solution for a very old dream was finally approaching a price point where it made sense. The patents were expiring; the panels were cheap and getting better by the month. The rest was plumbing. Hard plumbing, the sort that calls for a Carmack, maybe, but plumbing.

Rendering is the dream of a game industry desperately searching for a new immersion, another step in the ongoing escalation of immersion that has served as the economic engine of ongoing hardware replacement, the false god of “games getting better.” It was an out: the plucky indie that bucked the big consoles but still gave us the AAA. It was supposed to enable “art.”

But rendering was never the point.

Look, there are a few big visions for the future of computing doing battle.

There’s a wearable camp, full of glasses and watches. It’s still nascent, but its doom is already waiting in the wings; biocomputing of various sorts (first contacts, then implants, nano, who knows) will unquestionably win out over time, just because glasses and watches are what tech has been removing from us, not getting us to put back on. Google has its bets down here.

There’s a beacon-y camp, one where mesh networks and constant broadcasts label and dissect everything around us, blaring ads and enticing us with sales coupons as we walk through malls. In this world, everything is annotated and shouting at a digital level, passing messages back and forth. It’s an ubicomp environment where everything is “smart.” Apple has its bets down here.

These two things are going to get married. One is the mouth, the other the ears. One is the poke, the other the skin. And then we’re in a cyberpunk dream of ads that float next to us as we walk, getting between us and the other people, our every movement mined for Big Data.

In this world, what is Oculus? What is something as simple as a mere social network? After all, a social network is just ubicomp on people; Facebook on a watch or a pair of glasses is just another way to say that we’ll have our own set of semantic tags and labels stuck on our flesh, with those with the eyes to see. Worse, it’s one that relies on what we say, which is very different from what we do. It’s one that relies on supposed friend networks that are self-reported, when soon enough biometric data will report back up who we actually care about, how our pulse quickens when in the presence of the right person.

I have a deep respect for the technical scale that FB operates at. The cyberspace we want for VR will be at this scale.

— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) March 26, 2014

The virtue of Oculus lies in presence. A startling, unusual sort of presence. Immersion is nice, but presence is something else again. Presence is what makes Facebook feel like a conversation. Presence is what makes you hang out on World of Warcraft. Presence is what makes offices persist in the face of more than enough capability for remote work. Presence is why a video series can out-draw a text-based MOOC and presence is why live concerts can make more money than album sales.

Facebook is laying its bet on people, instead of smart objects. It’s banking on the idea that doing things with one another online — the thing that has fueled it all this time — is going to keep being important. This is a play to own walking through Machu Picchu without leaving home, a play to own every classroom and every museum. This is a play to own what you do with other people.

Oh, there will be room for games. But Oculus, in the end, serves Facebook by becoming the interface to other people online. I’d feel better about this if Facebook understood people, institutionally. I’m never quite sure if they do.

Long ago, at the Metaverse Roadmapping sessions, we discussed the ways in which virtuality could be used:

1. Augmented reality
2. Lifelogging
3. Virtual worlds
4. Mirror worlds

#2 is all Glass is currently useful for; a glorified video camera, until the augmented aspect kicks in. The addition of indoor mapping, beacons, Bluetooth LE, mesh networks, and suddenly the first two leap to life. Once it’s here, we’ll forget what life was like without it, swimming in a sea of data.

Facebook is placing its new bet on the bottom half. It already logs lives, in a way. It aspires to be the semantic tags on every abstract entity — that’s what Open Graph was about — but a lot of folks are fighting over that pie, not least of which is Google. What Oculus opens is the bottom two.

A while back I wrote

A lot of the praxis around virtual worlds — and indeed, games in general — has been co-opted by social media… But it doesn’t mean virtual worlds are over. They are metamorphosing, and like a caterpillar, on the path to mass market acceptance, they are shedding the excess legs and creepy worm-like looks in favor of something that doesn’t much resemble what it sprang from, but which a lot more people will like. And which will be a bit harder to pin down.

In that piece, I said the issues with virtual worlds, the reasons why they were fading, were because what virtual worlds offered was mostly just placeness, at a time when “good enough” placeness was available everywhere. But immersive VR raises the stakes on placeness.

Facebook’s purchase of Oculus is the first crack in the chrysalis of a new vision of a cyberspace, a Metaverse. It’s one that the Oculus guys have always shared. It wasn’t ever about the rendering for them either. Games were always a stepping stone. It was about placeness, and Facebook is providing the populace.

Is it enough to win out? I don’t know. The real world is mighty compelling. The sorts of dreams Oculus enables are the same damn dreams we’ve always had for virtual worlds:

• attend a virtual concert
• learn in a virtual classroom
• talk to a virtual meeting
• sleep with a virtual partner
• slay a virtual dragon
• build a virtual cathedral

Oh, it can be the best damn version of this ever. But to me the trends say that building the cathedral out of nano-based smart dust may end up being a bit more compelling. It certainly provides a more direct path to the money, and let’s not kid ourselves, anyone who spends $2 billion cares about the money.

Either way, no matter who wins out, it was never about the rendering. All four of these visions have one thing in common: the servers.

It’s about who owns the servers.

The servers that store your metrics. The servers that shout the ads. The servers that transmit your chat. The servers that geofence your every movement.

It’s time to wake up to the fact that you’re just another avatar in someone else’s MMO. Worse. From where they stand, all-powerful Big Data analysts that they are, you look an awful lot like a bot.

The real race isn’t over the client — the glasses, watches, phones, or goggles. It’s over the servers. It’s over the operating system. The one that understands countless layers of semantic tags upon every object on earth, the one that knows who to show you in Machu Picchu, the one that lets you turn whole visualizations of reality on and off.

Hopefully, the one that isn’t owned by anyone. (I have a spec I started. But nobody wants it. Money, remember?)

Pshhht, rendering? We’ll get new client hardware, new client software. Big whoop. I’m a lot more worried about whose EULA is going to govern my life.

 

 

MARGARET

THESE GHOULS ARE BULLSHIT

angimoto:

please follow my instagram! :)

sachinteng:

30 Day Challenge // Day 24 // Something That Represents our Favorite Culture

I’m Buddhist and I’ve always loved the imagery even before I was. The wrathful deities from Tibetan and Mahayana art always fascinated me as a kid. They were like transformations the gods took on in battle. Like a monster magical girl I guess. His is name is Mahakala. Power Prism Make Up.

All photos by Jason Quigley.

Last night St. Vincent blazed through a show the Crystal Ballroom, showcasing Annie Clark's theatricality and shreddosity* with a set that highlighted her newest, self-titled album. Photographer Jason Quigley was there to capture these great shots, of which there are many more over on End Hits. Check 'em out!

*not a thing

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	Courtney shared this story from slacktivist:
	"Would you be mine, could you be mine? Won't you be my neighbor?"

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In writing about Fred and Anti-Fred — the polar opposite ministers Fred Rogers and Fred Phelps — I missed a felicitous/providential grace note from yesterday’s news: Fred Phelps died on Fred Rogers birthday.

Tom Junod writes:

It is eerie symmetry that the day of Fred Phelps died is also the day Fred Rogers would have turned 86. I am tempted to call it karma, and to crow that such coincidence offers indisputable proof that in the mind of God, the good Fred wins. But hey, it’s Mister Rogers’ birthday, and so I can only do what he would do:

Pray that now, with the Minister of Hate gone, some poor soldier can finally get his rest, and some poor child get her sleep.

Junod, who wrote that remarkable profile of Rogers we discussed the other day, also notes another connection of sorts that I hadn’t remembered between Fred and Anti-Fred — Phelps’ hateful crew picketed at Mister Rogers’ 2003 funeral in Pittsburgh:

The police moved in, out of fear that the confrontation might escalate into the violence that Phelps apparently craved. (What I heard, even then, was that he made his living filing lawsuits against those he’d provoked into some kind of physical response.)

But there was no violence. There could be no violence, atthisparticular funeral, and all the counter-protesters did was sing the song indelibly associated with both the deceased and with American childhood — because the deceased was indelibly associated with American childhood. “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood,” they sang, and I had a chance to talk to some of the people from Westboro, and to observe their own American children.

I don’t remember anything they said. What I do remember was how their children looked, and the keen and nearly overwhelming sense of loss the appearance of their children elicited. There were so many of them, for one thing; the Westboro congregation turned out to be a young one, and even some of the lank-haired women holding signs and spitting epithets turned out be, on closer inspection, teenagers. And they were all so poor. I’m not speaking simply of their clothes, and their teeth, and their grammar, or any of the other markers of class in America. I’m speaking of their poverty of spirit. Whether they were sixteen or six, they looked to be already exhausted, already depleted, with greasy hair, dirty faces, and circles under their eyes that had already hardened into purplish dents. They looked as if they were far from home, and didn’t know where they were going next. They looked, in truth, not just poorly taken care of, but abused, if not physically then by a belief inimical to childhood — the belief that to be alive is to hate and be hated.

It was the condition of those children that was the true profanation of the funeral of Fred McFeely Rogers.

The name means “peace.” Peace and Anti-Peace — those are always two available options.

See earlier:

• Let’s make the most of this beautiful day

• The Anti-Fred is dead. Look for the helpers.

http://uggly.tumblr.com/


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glita:

oh

my

god

	Courtney shared this story from Blue Mass Group - Front Page:
	Sharing for one person, she knows who she is.

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Just saw this bit of news on the wire:

Carl Sciortino is stepping down as State Representative for West Somerville and West Medford to become Executive Director of The AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts.

Here is their statement:

During nine years in office, Sciortino distinguished himself as an effective and reliable proponent of policy changes, as well as allocation of resources, to aid those living with, and vulnerable to, HIV infection. In 2012, he supported passage of a law resulting in expanded HIV testing, and he has consistently sponsored budget amendments seeking increases in funding for HIV outreach, prevention, and education. He has championed social justice issues throughout his career including the right of same-sex couples to marry; banning discrimination against transgender people; expanding access to health care; and increasing resources for anti-poverty programs.

And here is Carl’s:

“As a gay man living with HIV, I am honored to lead one of the country’s oldest and most effective organizations in the battle against this disease which has raged on over 30 years,” said Sciortino. “My goal for AIDS Action in the years ahead is simple: continue the work that has resulted in lowering the rate of new HIV diagnoses in Massachusetts; provide the multitude of services needed to keep those living with HIV/AIDS connected with health care providers; and continue the public conversation about HIV needed to reduce the stigma that is still so closely associated with this disease.”

I congratulate Carl Sciortino on his new position and wish him the best of luck in a role I am sure he will excel at. Unfortunately, he was one of the fiercest and articulate advocates for truly progressive politics in the House and his resignation will create a void that will be hard to fill. Seeing as the general is only a few months away I am not sure if we will see another special or not or who the candidates might be, but until then I will just reiterate how much I appreciated his groundbreaking first campaign, his service, his CD5 campaign,
and his advocacy as a legislator.

“doesnt load my NES GAMES!!!” reads a review of this animal cage being sold as a NES, and they’re probably right.