firehose

Why Norway Might Have to Tear Down These Massive Picasso Murals:

Norway finds itself in a tough conundrum after a terrorist attack crippled a pair of Brutalist buildings in downtown Oslo. Tearing down the buildings is one thing—they’re crumbling, controversial and, well, brutal. Destroying the Picasso murals carved into the concrete, however, is an entirely different matter.

Details from the Wall Street Journal, but it’s paywalled, so you can get the bullet from Gizmodo here.

Despite spending $82 million so far -- two weeks past its launch date -- the online exchange hasn't enrolled anyone. So what happened? Officials cite a number of contributing factors, including higher standards on website functionality than other states, more ambitious vision than most states of how the exchange will work, late-breaking new rules from the federal government, and delays by contractors in meeting quality and testing standards expected by the state.

desliz:

In the generic queer template, everyone’s either really skinny or a little pudgy with bad posture, and everyone has short hair, tattoos, and piercings. Long hair is for straight and/or trans women. Everyone lives in a city and no one over 30 is likely to be found. Sometimes, one or two of them will be people of color, but they will be partnered with white people so nobody panics. There are lots of bikes.

thats-not-victorian:

etoire:

Steampunk Tendencies-achitecture

18th century Palazzo Valguarnera-Gangi — Sicilian Baroque. 

Modern Day China | Via

A jovial group of Red Guards bask in the golden glow of cornfields, waving their flags at the magnificent harvest, while a rustic farming couple look on, carrying an overflowing basket of perfectly plump red apples. It could be one of the many thousands of posters issued by the Chinese Communist Party’s Propaganda Department in the 1950s, of rosy-cheeked comrades brimming with vim and vigour. But something’s not quite right.

In the centre of this vision of optimism, where once might have beamed the cheerful face of Mao, stands the twisted loop of the China Central Television (CCTV) headquarters, radiating a lilac sheen. Framed by the vapour trail of a trio of jet-planes performing a victory flypast into the sunset, the building stands like a triumphal gateway to some promised land of Socialism with Chinese characteristics.

Winners of the Landscape Photographer of the Year 2013 | Via

brianmichaelbendis:

art of John Berkey

When I was a kid, I would stare at these illustrations, these paintings, for hours. To this day, I cannot imagine how they are created.

Original Source

Dejobaan has a reputation for crafting obnoxiously titled, outrageous games such as AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! and Drop that Beat like an Ugly Baby, but Elegy for a Dead World is different. Created with Girls Like Robots developer Ziba Scott, Elegy is a soft-spoken, experimental game that has players observe the ruins of lost civilizations and write down their histories to share with the Homeworld, the Steam Workshop. There, players can compare notes and rate each other's stories, poems and thoughts, Indie Games reports.

Elegy is inspired by classic English Romantic poetry, and its three worlds pull from the works of Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. Dejobaan recently entered Elegy into IGF 2014, eventually slated for PC and Mac on Steam. Sit down with some poetry in its first teaser trailer and sole screenshot below.

Continue reading Elegy for a Dead World turns players into poets

Elegy for a Dead World turns players into poets originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 21 Oct 2013 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While unicorns love summer for all its sunshine and rainbows, they are also fond of autumn. We took this unicorn to a corn maze and he declared himself king of the pumpkin patch. 

Thanks to Stocker Farms for letting us take pictures! 

Buy your own Unicorn Mask here

The scheme sounds like a work of near science fiction. But police in the Netherlands and Belgium insist its true, and say they have the evidence to prove it: two tons of cocaine and heroin, a machine gun, a suitcase stuffed with $1.7 million, and hard drive cases turned into hacking devices.

This is an excerpt from "Queering Game Development", a talk I'm giving at QGCon (October 26-27) at UC Berkeley. Registration is free and open to the public.

You could see "games", as a complex field of theory and practice, as roughly the sum of three sub-fields: Game Studies, Game Design, and Game Development.

Game studies is generally the study of games as culture and media, games as symbols, games as performance... and all the meaning that arises from that. A game studies reading of Monopoly might look at how it represents capitalist ideas of ownership and achievement, or its history as originally the "Landlord's Game", an anti-capitalist game about exposing tenant exploitation.

Game design looks at games more as rules and components, at the way that strategy or story emerge from play. A game designer's reading of Monopoly might look at the probability distribution of dice rolls and the board layout, and the payoff matrix for making certain decisions. A game designer is especially interested in the operational rules required to play the game, as well as the different roles that players might perform. They ask many of the same questions as in game studies, but with more of a focus on articulating what a "good game" is; they are oriented towards making things.

Game development looks at the implementation of games, at the workflows and engineering and processes in designing and building, both analog and digital games. A game developer's reading of Monopoly might look at the different ways of porting different Monopoly themes (what's the difference between Star Wars Monopoly and Scooby Doo Monopoly?) or maybe porting it to a digital game -- how do you make an Monopoly AI? How do you store game data? Is it a 2D or a 3D game? Which will take less time to develop? What's a better way to produce this thing?

(These definitions are very loose and not meant to be exclusionary... it's meant more to give you a general idea of where I'm coming from.)


Right now, I think Game Studies interfaces with Game Design frequently, and Game Design interfaces with Game Development... but Game Studies and Game Development do not really cross-pollinate as much as they could. We do not routinely consider the aesthetic, cultural, and/or political discourse behind engineering a video game.

Queer and feminist critiques of games often rely on high level conceptual approaches to games -- that is, analyzing games as cultural products or media objects. The game developer's response is to go technical and go low-level, to argue that their game engine could not support playable women characters, or to argue production schedules allowed no time to support queer content, etc.

Ignoring temporarily how those are bullshit reasons, what if we chased them into the matrix?

Interpreting programs as texts is interesting because programmers must wear their intent on their sleeves. Code projects routinely have more than one author; open-source projects often have dozens, if not hundreds of authors, and ideally each contributor will register and flag their intent.

A program is well-designed when you can tell what design patterns the programmer followed, what naming conventions the programmer used, and how each part of the program interacts with a different part of the program, etc. A theoretical "source code repository" of The Great Gatsby would consist of all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's revisions and drafts, his marginalia, his notes, timestamps for every single tracked change... a treasure trove of evidence beyond any scholar's wildest dreams. But in software development and game development, this type of "version control" is standard AND freely available! Why aren't we diving in?

Because I'm a teacher, I see this as an education problem. We need to educate more people in code literacy AND in the methodology of cultural study. I'm not saying all games scholars and designers should become John Carmack or Judith Butler, and code their own 3D engines that disclose gender performance as a mode of existence, but I think being able to read and interpret the actual source code of a program is a powerful analytical lens for studying how people go about making games and how certain games work.

And if you don't already know how to do this kind of stuff, then we (me and my many allies) look forward to teaching you how.

It’s not blinking

Recently in Florida, a 14-year-old girl was walking down the street when a man in an SUV pulled up beside her and offered her $200 to have sex with him.

When the girl refused, he pulled her by her hair into his vehicle and choked her until she lost consciousness. Then he dropped her on the ground and ran over her multiple times, only stopping when witnesses intervened. The girl was airlifted to a hospital and stabilized. The man has been arrested and charged with attempted murder and kidnapping.

Lest you think outrageous incidents like these are an anomaly, a few weeks ago, a man in a car pulled up next to a woman running in California and offered her a ride. When she refused, he backed up and hit her not once, but twice, dragging her behind him the second time. She sustained non-life threatening injuries, and the suspect is facing charges of second-degree assault and hit-and-run.

It’s not just men in cars who harass and harm women. In Georgia, a woman was walking alone at night and three men approached her, trying to talk to her. She ignored the men and, without warning, they pushed her to the ground. Two men held her down while the third man sexually assaulted her until a passerby scared them away and helped the woman home.

These seem like extreme stories. But in a survey of 811 women, 75 percent reported they had been followed by a man they did not know, more than 50 percent had been sexually touched, and 25 percent had been assaulted. Nearly one in four of these women said their street harassment experiences began around age 12 and nearly 90 percent said they had been harassed by age 19.

Since whistling, comments such as “Hey, baby” and demands for a smile or a phone number are the most common and visible forms of gender-based street harassment, it is easy for many people to dismiss the problem.

“Get over yourself.” “It’s a compliment.” “What’s the big deal?” “If you don’t want to be harassed, don’t go outside.” These are examples of what I’ve been told for speaking out, while others, like activist/writer Soraya Chemaly, have been told to “lighten up” and that the behavior is just “flirting.”

While people may think it is a stretch to connect catcalls with assault and attempted murder, sometimes catcalls escalate into something worse and women never know when that might happen.

More importantly, both catcalls and assault are forms of entitlement. The (primarily) male street harassers believe they have the right to access girls’ and women’s bodies. They feel they can say and do whatever they want, and if women don’t comply, well, then they’re a bitch or ugly, and the men may feel justified in grabbing them, throwing trash at them, assaulting them or running them over.

As a leading expert on this topic, I’m often asked what people can do to avoid harassment. This is the wrong question. Girls and women already change their lives in myriad and often impractical ways to avoid harassment, such as changing routes and routines and even moving neighborhoods–and such tactics don’t always work.

We need to ask instead how we can stop harassers and how we teach men to stop acting entitled to women’s attention or bodies.

Here are three ideas.

1. Call out, interrupt or distract friends who are harassers. Many harassers (including women) only harass in groups and they may be trying to impress their friends or get a laugh. Friends telling them it’s not funny or cool can influence them to stop. This video includes many ideas for what to say to harassers, and Stop Street Harassment’s website offers tips.
2. Report and protest cultural content that encourages street harassment and assault and portrays it as OK. The YouTube channel Simple Pickups (with more than 1 million subscribers) is one example; it teaches men how to make vulgar and threatening comments and to grope women they don’t know, including such lines as, “What is the biggest c*ck you’ve ever had up your a**hole?” and “This right here means you like to have your face ji**ed on.” It’s never okay for someone to speak like that to someone without their consent. Sign this Change.org petition asking YouTube to take down the channel.
3. Break the cycle of harassment and talk to kids, especially boys, about the issue. Often, when kids start out as harassers, they are mimicking what they’ve seen among male relatives or older friends, or they are trying out what they’ve seen in the media (including kids’ cartoons and online porn). Talking to them at a young age about what street harassment is and how to interact with people respectfully in public spaces without being a harasser is extremely important to help counterbalance those messages. Here are three resources to help: The Futures Without Violence program Coaching Boys into Men provides men with a playbook/toolkit they can use to talk with boys about street harassment, domestic violence and sexual violence; the Roger’s Park Young Women’s Action Team compiled their work on addressing gender-based violence with boys in the “Where Our Boys At?” toolkit; and Jake Winn, a Peace Corps volunteer and youth development facilitator in northern Azerbaijan helped his male students make an Anti-Street Harassment video as well as developing a companion lesson plan.

Street harassment is not a joke nor a compliment, and it’s time for everyone to commit to stopping it.

Photo taken from Stop Street Harassment.

Holly Kearl is the founder of the nonprofit organization Stop Street Harassment and author of two books about street harassment, including the just-released  50 Stories about Stopping Street Harassers. She also works as an international consultant for the United Nations’ Global Safe Cities Initiative.

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I love beer makers' sense of humor. Here are some names of real homebrew clubs I found online. Carboy Junkies Barley Literate Foam Rangers Barley Bandits Just Brew It Malt Munching Mash Monsters Cleveland Carboys Knights of the Brown Bottle S_C_A_B_B_S (Sussex County Amalgamated Beer Brewing Society) Hops2It Manly Mashers Fermental Order of Rennaissance Draughtsmen Motor City Mashers BEAVR (Brewing Enthusiasts of the Antelope Valley Region) Grain2Grin Brew Free or Die (New Hampshire, of course) CRABS - Chesapeake Real Ale Brewers Society Maltose Falcons The San Andreas Malts Brewers United for Real Potables (BURP) The Dead Yeast Society The Boston Wort Processors Lager-Rhythmics

[Visit Alcademics.com for the full post.]

Kristian vonBengtson writes "A DIY, manned space program like Copenhagen Suborbitals is kept alive by keeping total independence, cutting the red tape and simply just doing it all in a garage. We basically try to stay below the radar at all time and are reluctant in engagements leading to signing papers or do things (too much) by the books. But now there might be trouble ahead. (Saul Goodman! We need you...) During the last 5 years we have encountered many weird legal cases which does not make much sense and no one can explain their origin. If we were to fix up a batch of regular black gunpowder (which we use for igniters) we are entitled for serving time in jail. Even a few grams. But no one give a hoot about building a rocket fueled with 12 tonnes of liquid oxygen and alcohol. Thats is perfectly legal. If Copenhagen Suborbitals fly a rocket into space for the first time there are likely legal action that must be dealt with. At my time at the International Space University we had lectures and exams in space law and I remember the Outer Space Treaty which is the most ratified space treaty with over 100 countries including Denmark and U.S. And here is the matter – in which I seek some kind of advice or what you may call it: Outer Space Treaty, Article 6 states: 'the activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty.' Does this mean that Denmark (or any other country for that matter – if it was your project) suddenly have to approve what we are doing and will be kept responsible for our mission, if we launch into space?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

hodad

#everythingisterrible

Health teams in Pakistan have been attacked repeatedly since the Taliban denounced vaccines as a Western plot to sterilize Muslims and imposed bans on inoculation in June 2012.

In North Waziristan, a region near the Afghan border that has been cordoned off by the Taliban, dozens of children, many under the age of two, have been crippled by the viral disease in the past six months.

And there is evidence in tests conducted on sewage samples in some of the country's major cities that the polio virus is starting to spread beyond these isolated pockets and could soon spark fresh polio outbreaks in more densely populated areas.

Original Source

Taylor, the man who is seen actually shoving the rock to the ground, had filed a personal injury lawsuit against a woman and her father for injuries he says he suffered in a 2009 car crash.  Taylor filed the lawsuit at the beginning of September saying that after that accident he injured his back and had to "endure great pain and suffering, disability, impairment, loss of joy of life."  Taylor also says in the lawsuit that the accident was "debilitating."

Original Source

Contrary to public claims, Apple can read your iMessages:

Control of keys gives Apple ability to read iMessages, despite end-to-end encryption.

But you all kinda knew that anyway, right?

The library inside the National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York isn’t your average hall full of dog-eared books. It houses some original documents used in the making of some of the most legendary, important videogames ever created. And we got to see them.

"We need to run the experiment, to show what a society run by Silicon Valley looks like...We need to build opt-in society, outside the US, run by technology."

Found at imgur, via Reddit.