Among his many titles—Commander Of The Order Of The British Empire, “Spirit Of Metal” award winner, Count—the late Christopher Lee held one that might be the most badass of them all: the record for most appearances in films with swordfights in them. From his early roles in Hammer’s Dracula movies or as the villainous Rochefort in The Three Musketeers up through performances like the spry Sith Lord Dooku in Attack Of The Clones, Lee spent much of his career wielding implements of death at his less-charismatic foes. And now, thanks to an old clip that’s resurfaced on YouTube, you can learn to battle and belittle your foes with that same élan.
The video is an excerpt from The Many Faces Of Christopher Lee, a 1996 documentary that featured the then-74-year-old actor holding forth on his various storied roles. During this portion, he picks up a rapier ...
To everyone reading this who wasn’t alive in the 70′s:
Every single day you need to say thanks that you weren’t around then - Because you’d either be wearing this stuff, or have to look at people around you who were! (x)
(I remember Mum reading Kays catalogues with pics like these in them!! Which sadly shows my age!)
ALL the catalogues looked like this. The Sears catalogue was SCARY.
I’m surprised by this caption. I presumed any text after these amazing photos would be something about how awesome and varied and colourful men’s clothing in the 70s were, how they weren’t afraid of classically feminine cuts and looks, and how we need to bring all this stuff back in an effort to fight toxic masculinity. What’s wrong with some slinky orange loungewear, I ask you?
I’m not sure what point in the day those bathing suits were designed for, but I think all points in the day are completely appropriate.
Tell me you’ve never longed for all the men around you to be decked out in jaunty belted sweaters or a matching shirt and underpants sets, or some drapey red spandex slacks. Tell me that and I’ll know you’re lying.
LOW SLUNG BELTED SWEATERS. TINY WHITE SHORTS. “ONE EASY PIECE.” Good god can we please get over our fear of the masculine thigh and bring some of this back already?
NEW YORK—With the increasingly warm weather signaling the commencement of their age-old journey, millions of children across the North American continent began their annual summer migration to their fathers’ homes this week, sources confirmed. “At this moment, in every corner of the country, children are setting out from their normal wintering grounds en route to their dad’s place,” said Duke University anthropologist Robert Benson, explaining how these youths follow the same interstate routes they travel every year to the region of the country containing their fathers’ townhouses, where they will make a temporary home for themselves among their specially arranged twin beds and pull-out sofas for the remainder of the summer months. “While the journey is not easy, and often leads the children to conditions that are far less hospitable than those they enjoy during the rest of the year, this is simply a natural rite these boys ...
'Who’s really hurt the most? The employees of Zenefits customers. There are likely a ton of businesses that are going to need to scramble to run payroll directly via ADP. Do you know what’s not fun? Scrambling to deal with payroll because 2 dudes had a phone fight on a Saturday night.'
A conflict between one of the biggest providers of corporate payroll services and one of the world’s most highly valued startups spilled into court on Tuesday. Payroll providerADP filed a lawsuit accusing Silicon Valley high-flier Zenefits of defamation.
The dispute started when ADP blocked Zenefits from accessing payroll information on behalf of the startup’s customers, some of whom use the company as a middleman for the payroll provider’s services. The companies disagree on the circumstances that led to ADP’s action, and they have waged in a bitter war of words this week.
The disagreement escalated with the lawsuit, filed with the U.S. district court in San Francisco. ADP’s complaint said Zenefits and its chief executive, Parker Conrad, launched a “manipulative and malicious public relations campaign, ignoring its own conduct, to defame ADP and drive away ADP’s clients.” ADP also said Zenefits defamed the payroll giant when it “alleged that ADP intentionally sought to cause harm to ADP’s clients solely to gain an unfair competitive advantage against Zenefits.”
In a further development, Zenefits said Wednesday that ADP had launched a competing product even as the payroll processor was denying it had moved to crush a potential rival.
Read more. This is an interesting story, ADP is saying Zenefits can apply for API access in a tweet here, it seems reasonable that ADP would not want Zenefits to have admin access from their customers and do a log-in site scrape for payroll via ADP. Zenefits should have likely asked, pretty risky if they didn’t. ADP was crappy here too, they could have told their customers they’re were going to cut off access at certain time/date and allow the customers to prepare, ADP obviously knew this was going on for awhile, if they didn’t that means they cannot detect massive data scraping from admin access, that’s bad too. Who’s really hurt the most? The employees of Zenefits customers. There are likely a ton of businesses that are going to need to scramble to run payroll directly via ADP. Do you know what’s not fun? Scrambling to deal with payroll because 2 dudes had a phone fight on a Saturday night.
[CEO of Zenefits] Conrad on Tuesday said he believed ADP’s lawsuit “was filed in really bad faith.” He said ADP CEO Carlos Rodriguez phoned him on Saturday night for what Conrad called a “Dirty Harry conversation.” According to Conrad, Rodriguez said, “You’re going to hear from our lawyers very soon, and you’re really going to hear from us on Monday.”
Of the Saturday phone call, ADP said, “During that conversation ADP’s position remained the same, and Mr. Rodriguez again requested that Zenefits immediately retract their comments, and made a good faith offer to properly partner. Mr. Parker would not comply, forcing ADP to tell its side of the story to our customers and the markets we serve.”
““She warned us against becoming a movement only for white middle class people, this was 41 years ago, and today, so much of the ways in which LGBT equality has played out has been about white middle class people.””
'Meanwhile, our submitter Ellen spotted this one at a drive-through daiquiri-store in Louisiana. “Apparently, you can buy everclear in a Styrofoam cup at 11 am without leaving your car, just you can’t pay for it with boob money.”'
Meanwhile, our submitter Ellen spotted this one at a drive-through daiquiri-store in Louisiana. “Apparently, you can buy everclear in a Styrofoam cup at 11 am without leaving your car, just you can’t pay for it with boob money.”
I'm just gonna keep resharing this, hope nobody minds
We, of course, know Noelle Stevenson from her hit comic series, Lumberjanes. However, long-time fans of Stevenson’s work know her web comic-turned-graphic novel, Nimona, the futuristic story of a young shapeshifter who teams up with a disgraced knight to overthrow a corrupt regime. Now, in addition to Lumberjanes being adapted into a live-action movie, Nimona is going to be adapted into an animated feature!
Fox Animation will be adapting Nimona, which will be helmed by Patrick Osborne, Oscar Award-winning animated short director, written by Mark Haimes, and produced by Vertigo Entertainment’s Roy Lee and Adam Stone.
Stevenson wrote and drew Nimona as a web comic while still a student at Maryland Institute College of Art (it was even her thesis). The popularity and acclaim of the comic led to Harvey and Eisner Awards, as well as her being awarded the Slate Cartoonist Studio Prize for best web comic in 2012.
Lest you think that Nimona is an all-dude affair, the project will be overseen by Fox executives Vanessa Morrison and Darlene Caamano Loquet. We’re thrilled by the possibilities, and by all the awesome Stevenson action coming to our screens!
"Quora is a question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users. The company was founded in June 2009, and the website was made available to the public on June 21, 2010. Quora aggregates questions and answers to topics. Users can collaborate by editing questions and suggesting edits to other users' answers." (Wikipedia)
Opinion/Notes: This is one of those logos where if no one had touched it for decades it would have been fine and the site would have kept going on just about the same but once someone points out its misgivings and offers up a perfectly calibrated alternative then you can't help but see its faults. The "Q" in the new logo is beautiful and bold, remaining as the quick identifier of the company in social media. The rest of the letters are just as nice and bookish, supporting the knowledge premise of the Quora brand. The tiny version of the logo is my favorite part of this. That's attention to detail.
Select Quote: Our aim was to increase design flexibility in order to create a larger range of ways to use Quora's logo in our design language, and to improve the craftsmanship of the word mark overall. We maintained consistency with our brand by keeping our unique 'Q' and Quora red color, while referencing the academic spirit of our original Baskerville logo.
Logo detail and three additional optical size versions.Social media icon.
An adorable one-eyed cat named Mick, who once needed his human‘s assistance to get a drink of water, slowly figures out how to turn on the bathroom faucet over and again.
“Backstage” is the comedy short that opened the 2015 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). The video features Bill Hader as the director in charge of coordinating the WWDC’s big opening number as his assistant Charlyne Yi walks him through all the final preparations. The elaborate number features jokes and references to many popular apps, and it culminates in a rap song about being a developer performed by Danny Pudi.
It’s good to be back at Litchfield. Copy editor Gwen Ihnat and social media manager Cameron Scheetz check in for visiting hours with the first two episodes of Orange Is The New Black’s third season, “Mother’s Day” and “Bed Bugs And Beyond.” The Netflix show wastes no time throwing viewers back into the lives of their favorite inmates as they welcome guests both wanted (their kids for a special Mother’s Day event) and unwanted (bedbugs). With all the excitement going on, Gwen and Cameron begin to wonder if Piper, the show’s nominal lead, and Alex, her penitentiary paramour, are the show’s least interesting storyline. Their love-hate relationship seems even less essential after Caputo gets some big news that casts a dark cloud on the season moving forward. For more on season three’s bigger picture, don’t forget to read Joshua Alston’s pre-air ...
This reliant robin found a highly unusual place to build its nest. The bird set up home in the engine compartment of Dr Zahida Hama’s car. Dr Hama’s husband Tariq, also a doctor, discovered the nest – complete with eggs – when he took the BMW to Redhill Hand Car Wash to get it cleaned. As the couple live in a semi-rural area of Redhill, they often find leaves and other foliage under the bonnet and get garage staff to vacuum inside. Picture: Newsteam
'“The bottom line is, if you want someone to read something on Twitter, don’t just link to it. Post a screenshort as well.”
The premise behind the screenshort is old, but the hype is new, and Honan wasn’t the only one trumpeting it. By late last year, bloggers were calling it a trend, and by the beginning of this one, major outlets such as the New York Times, BuzzFeed, Politico — even The Onion — were adopting the ‘short as a convenient work-around to social media (mostly Twitter)’s character restrictions. In a post from March, BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel wrote of the screenshort: “It’s a work-around to Twitter’s 140-character limit that doesn’t abuse the constraint as much as enhance it.” In April, The Next Web noted that celebrities such as Justin Bieber, Pink, and Lorde had adopted the screenshort as a bare-bones blogging tool, ultimately declaring that the traditional blog had been “killed by screenshorts.” At this point, a cursory scroll through Twitter — and, to a lesser extent, Instagram and Facebook — yields a consistent stream of these pictures of text.'
as always, thanks specifically to Twitter and Facebook
The screenshort is what a programmer or an architect — or, incidentally, a blind person — might call a universal design failure.
When seeing a new logo, how many times have you asked yourself, “Where have I seen that before?”
This year, Bill Gardner asked himself that very question 25,000 times.
Since founding the popular online logo database LogoLounge in 2002, Gardner has seen more than 200,000 logos (some approved, some rejected) contributed by graphic designers from more than 100 countries around the world. Every year, he summarizes his observations in a logo design trends report, grouping them into style taxonomies, as a kind of pulse survey of visual branding.
“Be educated by this, stand on the shoulders of others to advance our industry, but please do not consider this report a suggestion of what your next project should look like.” Unlike a trader following market trends or a clothes horse following fashion trends, Gardner, a graphic designer himself, isn’t necessarily following logo trends for inspiration—and he doesn’t advise anyone else to. As he says in the introduction to this year’s report, as he has for the last 13 years: “Be educated by this, stand on the shoulders of others to advance our industry, but please do not consider this report a suggestion of what your next project should look like.”
But the solutions arrived at by logo designers to help companies—or presidential candidates—create distinction from competitors is still plenty worthy of study. Gardner’s trend reports—the most comprehensive survey in the industry—serve as historical documents that have bearing not only in the evolution of design, but in the representation of business, technology, and culture at large. That’s an especially vital function right now, as mobile phones and smart watches have designers recalibrating the dimensions of their canvas, and the impact of their handiwork.
Here are the top 15 visual themes observed in the most recent year’s worth of emblems, excerpted from Gardner’s 2015 trends report, which was published this week:
(Bill Gardner / LogoLounge)
DotTip
There is a nod to science by referencing digital terminals with these, though that is becoming a pretty dated symbol in a world that is reliant on more advanced technology.
Contours
(Bill Gardner / LogoLounge)
This is just the amount of visual eye candy necessary to lift the logo from a page and create a point of optic differentiation. Some designers might view this technique as a bit too tricky for their liking but time will prove one group or the other right in the end.
Concentrak
(Bill Gardner / LogoLounge)
Played out against a dark background these logos are often packed with high-chroma color and can radiate like neon. It’s also not uncommon to see a gradation in the color to convey an additional message of shift or change as it relates to the entity it represents.
Sparkle
(Bill Gardner / LogoLounge)
Certainly not a new icon, but one that is on a rocketing resurgence. The four-pointed star is being refitted and reintroduced with a less divisive host of symbolism.
Pick-Up Sticks
(Bill Gardner / LogoLounge)
Possibly the most compelling reasons for utilizing this in a logo is its confrontational nature. Humans love order and serving up the antithesis guarantees a thoughtful encounter.
Coloring
(Bill Gardner / LogoLounge)
This is a natural progression that will stunt the creative juices of designer’s children who’d previously been admonished for NOT coloring outside the lines. All that said, these are really beautiful solutions that maintain a contemporary aesthetic. They manage to hybrid a relevant technique with some nostalgic coloring book skills and a smart limited palette.
Circle Break
(Bill Gardner / LogoLounge)
Imagine a pie chart so great that the middle has been eaten and all you’re left with is a really perfect ring of a crust with the same remnants of the colored wedges left on the perimeter. Occasionally there is a piece or two missing but the rim of a circle is always evident. The colored band areas may represent percentiles, or minutes on a clock, or some less orthodox representation, or they could just provide a decorative effect.
Trixelate
(Bill Gardner / LogoLounge)
Obviously the offspring of what happens when a triangle and a pixel hook-up. But not just a solid field of homogeneously consistent triangles. Full of diverse scale and with floating pieces that portray motion and the story of process.
Photo
(Bill Gardner / LogoLounge)
Those ascribing to traditional identity design tenets scrunch up their face and break into a cold sweat whenever a photographic image is interjected into a logo. You can literally see them squirm and then launch into a litany of challenges to this graphic taboo. Shake it off and embrace it.
Rays
(Bill Gardner / LogoLounge)
This year marked a dramatic bloom in the number of marks incorporating this technique. It may be an offshoot of a need to fill space with a single line weight decoration, but the diversity of application has been extraordinary.
Naive
(Bill Gardner / LogoLounge)
There is a renaissance of creating figural logos that have the spontaneity and whimsy of a child’s drawing with the insight and subtle design nuances of a mature rendering. The innocent nature of these solutions brings a smile to the mind. It assures us the product or the owners of the mark are not too full of themselves and likely have a sense of humor.
Coded
(Bill Gardner / LogoLounge)
These marks are for the theorists that have forever believed identity designers are craftily inserting conspiratorial or hidden messages in their work. Assembled from Morse code like morsels, these logos will have pseudo cryptographers chomping at the bit to decipher.
Chroma Coaster
(Bill Gardner / LogoLounge)
Using a single continuous line to swerve, tip and twist its way into a logo is a time-tested tool for designers. Quick and to the point these marks often rely on a line break or shadow at intersections to read well.
Detail
(Bill Gardner / LogoLounge)
Patterns may not be practical for viewing at smaller scales but still hold their own weight like the lines of an etching. Expand the scale of the mark and the line work blooms into a riot of decoration.
Shaded
(Bill Gardner / LogoLounge)
Shadows and dimensional letterforms from a typographic perspective give us a chance to demonstrate substance, illicit drama or provide a bit of campy nostalgia to suggest just a few.
In the course of his career, Gardner has seen trends, tropes, and clichés rise, fall, and resurrect themselves, sometimes several times over. Why bother with logo trends if everything is cyclical anyway? Gardner offers this insight to Quartz: “You have to know what’s been done in order to have relevance. It’s more important to know how you got there, rather than to know where you are.”
Dov Charney 'also apparently ran the company without many basic management functions. It lacked an organizational chart, for example, to show which managers reported to whom. It meant that around 60 people directly reported to him, according to Schneider. The average number of direct reports for the CEO of a large corporation is about 10.
Here’s a telling slide from Schneider’s presentation to investors this week about her plan to turn the struggling retailer around. Note particularly that the plan includes moves to “create organizational charts, job descriptions, salary bands,” to “formalize a bonus incentive structure for key employees,” and to “review and implement holiday and vacation pay policies,” all of which strongly suggest that these things barely existed, if at all, before.' ... '“I don’t know exactly what transpired. I know people got bonuses beforehand, but… there weren’t objectives [laid out] to get there,” Schneider said. “There wasn’t any paperwork that could show me what people had received in the past and why.”'
Dov Charney is not an easy actto follow for new CEO Paula Schneider. In addition to being the iconic founder of the brand, he’s left the company in dire financial straits, and continues to embroil it in a legal morass.
He also apparently ran the company without many basic management functions. It lacked an organizational chart, for example, to show which managers reported to whom. It meant that around 60 people directly reported to him, according to Schneider. The average number of direct reports for the CEO of a large corporation is about 10.
Here’s a telling slide from Schneider’s presentation to investors this week about her plan to turn the struggling retailer around. Note particularly that the plan includes moves to “create organizational charts, job descriptions, salary bands,” to “formalize a bonus incentive structure for key employees,” and to “review and implement holiday and vacation pay policies,” all of which strongly suggest that these things barely existed, if at all, before:
Annotated by Quartz
Asked about the slide, Schneider confirmed the absence of a structure.
“Yeah, traditional org charts were simply not there,” Schneider told Quartz. “As far as who reported to whom, when I was trying to figure out who reported to me there was probably 60 people that reported directly to Dov.”
Fixing that is particularly important as Schneider works to change the business.
“Dov is one of the hardest working people on the planet, but it’s really hard to scale that,” she told Quartz. “I need people that are going to lead their areas because I don’t have all of the knowledge. I didn’t create the company. I’m learning. But regardless, I believe from a scalability standpoint you have to have leaders who run their own business.”
Just five months into her tenure, she’s still finalizing the org chart. And there’s plenty of work to be done on other basics, like salary bands to define what certain positions or seniority levels get paid, and even giving people time off in a consistent way.
“We do not have any salary bands,” Schneider said. “We are lacking in a lot of the employee benefits other companies have. We just established the first four paid holidays ever.”
Pay structure was also not terribly well-delineated.
“I don’t know exactly what transpired. I know people got bonuses beforehand, but… there weren’t objectives [laid out] to get there,” Schneider said. “There wasn’t any paperwork that could show me what people had received in the past and why.”
Schneider is putting in a more rigorous system where, for top management at least, either the whole team hits the target and gets a bonus, or nobody does. While people go back and forth on how much hierarchy or how many layers of management are best at a company, when it comes to things like compensation and benefits, transparency and consistency is definitely viewed as better.
And limiting the number of direct reports to a CEO not only frees them up to think strategically, it gives other executives more autonomy and ownership.
Of course, simply building a management structure isn’t a panacea. It’s one part of an extensive turnaround plan that includes significant cost cutting, product investment, hiring fresh talent, and restructuring. She’s introducing a zero-based budgeting process for example, which the company never had before, and she’s rethinking the company’s approach to merchandizing, advertising and retailing. Still Schneider seems extremely confident in her plan, which aims to turn American Apparel from a $600 million into a billion dollar business.
leakage while connecting through a captive portal, before the VPN is active
'The real solution to this problem isn't hacking with firewalls, it's providing encryption by default in public Wi-Fi. This isn't done much now because that would mean supplying passwords, and the support overhead would just be too great for a cafe. The result is that we have an insecure situation with bad, but adequate, usability.
The Wi-Fi Alliance has had a solution for this problem nearly in place for years, called Passpoint. The Passpoint protocol was created to allow for Wi-Fi "roaming" by creating a way for access points to grant access by way of a third-party credential, such as your Google ID or your ISP account. When you connect to a public access point through Passpoint, it authenticates you and establishes a secure connection using WPA2-Enterprise, the gold standard in Wi-Fi security—instead of leaving your traffic unencrypted or visible on the shared wireless LAN.
The reason that you don't yet see Passpoint everywhere is that it requires the Wi-Fi provider—such as a consumer ISP, Google, or Boingo—to trust certain authentication providers and to advertise a list of them to connecting devices—the longer, the better. And users would need to configure Passpoint on their system to use one or more of their credentials when connecting to such a network. There hasn't been wide adoption of Passpoint yet—while it's been put to use in certain high-volume locations, such as many airports, it's still pretty uncommon.'
By now, any sentient IT person knows the perils of open Wi-Fi. Those free connections in cafes and hotels don't encrypt network traffic, so others on the network can read your traffic and possibly hijack your sessions. But one of the main solutions to this problem has a hole in it that isn't widely appreciated.
Large sites like Twitter and Google have adopted SSL broadly in order to protect users on such networks. But for broader protection, many people use a virtual private network (VPN). Most people, if they use a VPN at all, use a corporate one. But there are public services as well, such as F-Secure's Freedome and Privax's HideMyAss. Your device connects with the VPN service's servers and establishes an encrypted tunnel for all your Internet traffic from the device to their servers. The service then proxies all your traffic to and from its destination.
It's a better solution than relying on SSL from websites for a number of reasons: with a VPN, all of the traffic from your device is encrypted, whether the site you are visiting has SSL or not. Even if the Wi-Fi access point to which you are connected is malicious, it can't see the traffic. Any party that is in a position to monitor your traffic can't even see the addresses and URLs of the sites with which you are communicating, something they can do with SSL over open Wi-Fi.
Of all the declared and potential 2016 candidates in the Washington Post's net favorability poll, only Sen. Bernie Sanders is (barely) in positive territory.
The real-world surveys show that the overwhelming majority of presidential candidates are running negative favorability scores. Quinnipiac has Bernie Sanders at +1 overall, although that's partly because 62 percent of Americans say they haven't heard enough about him to form an opinion. The closest Republican is Marco Rubio — the same number of Americans say they view him positively as those who view him negatively, meaning his score nets out to exactly zero. Clinton and Obama are tied at -4. And it's all downhill from there, all the way down to Donald Trump. Only 15 percent of Americans view him favorably, compared to 71 percent who have a negative opinion. That gives him a net favorability of -56, more than twice as bad as the next-lowest candidate, Chris Christie, with his -26 score.
Capital One, the bank that has spoofed the often complex card rewards systems with its commercials featuring Samuel L. Jackson, appears to be upending the game with what some industry observers are calling an unprecedented offer: Users of Capital One’s no-fee Quicksilver card will receive 20% cash back on all charges for Uber, the popular mobile-based ride service, through April 30, 2016.
The promotion comes with no limits, so those who rely on Uber heavily stand to collect significant rewards. (Do the math: If you take a dozen $20 trips each month with Uber, you’re in line for $48 in monthly savings — or $500-plus a year.) Moreover, if you’ve yet to sign up for Uber, the Capital One promotion comes with a credit of up to $30 on each of your first two rides — effectively, a $60 bonus in addition to the 20% savings.
By now, most social-media savvy people have seen or heard about the artist Richard Prince and his “New Portraits” Instagram gallery. If you haven’t, basically Prince has taken screenshots of other people’s Instagram photos, blown them up into huge 6-foot tall inkjet prints, and sold them for nearly $90,000 each at the Frieze Art Fair in New York City.
As a photographer on Instagram, the story struck quite a chord. A large part of what I do in my free time includes creating unique content with my dogs for my Instagram account. What started as a casual hobby, however, eventually landed me a full-time job at Nestle Purina Petcare in a social media management and content creation position.
The road to this breakthrough was definitely not an easy one, and it reveals a lot about the ways Instagram’s privacy policies don’t protect many of its users the way they probably think they do. About two months after starting my Instagram account, I discovered one of my followers was stealing my photos and photoshopping her dog in place of mine. I contacted the Instagram team countless times about the problem, but was met with less than helpful responses: “Having reviewed your claim, we don’t see how the content you’ve reported, used in the manner depicted, could constitute a violation of your rights.”
How could it constitute a violation of my rights? To me, the violation was as plain as the screenshots of my manipulated and stolen images I had sent to the Instagram team.
Instagram claims that, “On the platform, if someone feels that their copyright has been violated, they can report it to us and we will take appropriate action. Off the platform, content owners can enforce their legal rights.” I was eventually able to get most of the stolen photos taken down—but it required months spent reporting each and every incident to Instagram. This is of little comfort to the users in the Richard Price case, however, who did not have their work reposted on the platform. Instead, these unlucky few found their work being sold without their permission in an offsite gallery, outside the purview of the social media platform.
Looking back, was my career advancement affected by others copying my work? Probably not, actually. But it would have mattered a lot more if I had been a self-employed freelancer. I have also dabbled in freelance content creation, and am still paid to partner with and create content for companies and brands. At the end of the day, my authenticity, originality, and value could be undermined by others copying or recycling my work elsewhere.
(Emily Wang/Instagram)
All this goes to show that there are still so many grey areas when it comes to intellectual property and ethics. Instagram of course is a company. It makes its money off of its users, and in turn some of its users make money off of being a part of its communities.
A minority of social network users take copyright infringement more seriously than others. This is understandable—putting aside the injustice of having your property stolen or repurposed, artwork and photography can be extremely personal in nature. I know of a photographer who discovered photos of her dog and baby were stolen from her Instagram and used by a company in Hong Kong for marketing purposes. Photos of her child were being used, without permission, to sell a company’s products. Talk about an extremely invasive, frustration experience.
Others, like popular pin-up model site @Suicidegirls—one of the Instagram accounts Prince used in his art show—have more of a “What can I do anyway?” attitude.
For me, Richard Prince’s story reveals a larger problem with social media today: technology is progressing far faster than the pace of policymakers, an especially frustrating phenomenon for those in the artistic or creative fields. A similar case study may be the current disruption of the transportation industry created by ride-sharing companies like Uber. Uber has been able to take advantage of loopholes in outdated transportation laws originally designed to protect taxicab drivers and customers.
Like Richard Prince, the Instagrammer who stole my photos and reposted them existed in something of a grey area, where ethical mores are not necessarily supported by public or even corporate policy. As Jose Pagliery wrote for CNN Money recently: “You forfeit certain rights by using a social media network. And once your photos are out in public, they’re out of your hands forever.” My story has a happy ending, at least, we clearly still haven’t totally figured out how to regulate technology that is rapidly changing the ways in which we interact with the world—and the world interacts with us.
In what increasingly seems like a piece of decades-long, deeply depressing performance art—or maybe a stunning bit of stealth marketing from whoever gets paid to promote the word “quixotic”—director Terry Gilliam has been working since 1998 to bring an adaptation of Don Quixote to the screen. Now, it’s been announced that Amazon is teaming up with the Time Banditsand Zero Theoremdirector in his cosmically suicidal efforts to goad the universe into stopping him from making The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.
Gilliam confirmed the plan earlier this week, during an interview about the upcoming Criterion Collection release of The Fisher King. The director laughingly referred to Quixote as “my madness,” in a lighthearted way that suggests he’s already heard all your jokes about how the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result—i.e ...
'Later, in an apparent reference to studies tracing the scientific origins of human life to Africa, Dolezal added: “We’re all from the African continent.”
Dolezal is credited with re-energizing the Spokane chapter of the NAACP. She also serves as chairwoman of the city’s Office of Police Ombudsman Commission, where she identified herself as white, black and American Indian in her application for the volunteer appointment, and previously was education director for the Human Rights Education Institute in Coeur d’Alene.
In recent days, questions have arisen about her background and her numerous complaints to police of harassment. Members of her family are challenging her very identity, saying she has misrepresented major portions of her life.
Dolezal’s mother, Ruthanne Dolezal, said Thursday by phone from her home in Northwest Montana that she has had no contact with her daughter in years. She said her daughter began to “disguise herself” in 2006 or 2007, after the family had adopted four African-American children and Rachel Dolezal had shown an interest in portrait art.
“It’s very sad that Rachel has not just been herself,” Ruthanne Dolezal said. “Her effectiveness in the causes of the African-American community would have been so much more viable, and she would have been more effective if she had just been honest with everybody.”'
Controversy is swirling around one of the Inland Northwest’s most prominent civil rights activists, with family members of Rachel Dolezal saying the local leader of the NAACP has been falsely portraying herself as black for years.
Super Opinionated.
