can someone please tell me what’s wrong with Banksy? Cause I don’t understand and everything I’ve seen about anything being wrong with Banksy… Is someone asking and not getting a real answer.
Banksy is p much the face of gentrification–when poor brown people express themselves and are taggers, they get arrested. When Banksy does it as a well-off white guy, he’s rewarded.
Tagging is largely the oppressed claiming space, space for themselves and space for their art. It’s not meant to make anyone feel comfortable. The fact that the very same people who think that black people’s live are worth so little embrace Banksy is proof of this.
One of the things that’s recently pissed a lot of taggers off is, he’s not part of the tagger community and doesn’t know the rules, doesn’t follow them. NYC is locals only when it comes to graffiti, since they’re the ones whose space it is.
Like. He went to East NYC, predominately black and Latinx, majority poor, where there are a TON of local taggers, and claimed areas as his, Instagrammed the general area so people (mainly white middle to upper class) could come flocking He’s going to poor parts of NY–areas where taggers flourish–and waltzing in and claiming space as his.
He’s also like, peak liberal. ‘Down with the system!’ while being the very system itself. ‘Destroy capitalism!’ while doing everything he can to capitalize. Literally ‘If you repeat a lie often enough it becomes politics’ while being someone who benefits from the horrors committed.
Basically, you got white hipster British dude who hsa access to p much any medium he wants choosing to use a medium that has a legacy and a meaning that he will never understand, to spread the most watered down messages of all time. He’s like the Zen Pencils of the Graffiti World.
If you’re interested, here is a post talking about some great and well known taggers who aren’t Banksy.
This blog showcases real graffiti art and is largely artist-submitted. (WARNING: AUTOPLAY!) You look at some of these gorgeous works, hand painted that takes days/weeks to complete, you look at the skill and the artistry and you just have to go…And all this recognition is going to Stencilhead LiberalBoy instead, while the actual artists are getting slammed to the ground by cops and charged ridiculous fees.
Also, Banksy went to Gaza Strip a number of times to tag walls in the midst of the rubble. Which is aggravating on so many levels, seeing as not ONLY is Banksy tagging walls that have already been tagged by Palestinians who are expressing their struggles (if you guys want more photos, just ask, I’ve taken a bunch of pictures of Palestinian graffiti), but Banksy is privileged enough to enter and exit the Gaza Strip without any issue– something Gazans are not allowed to do, seeing as they’re under a fucking siege.
But of course, Banksy can tag a wall with a picture of a kitten because “people on the internet love looking at kittens”, and it hits every goddamn media outlet, but when Palestinians tag walls with murals and quotes and images that are FAR more moving and actually have to do with the Palestinian struggle, the whole world is silent.
'A few years ago, Kathy Phipps got sick of her Katrina story. She got tired of constantly replaying the trauma in her head, of reliving the shock of escaping Katrina’s waters, of getting off a plane she thought was going to Texas and finding herself instead in Utah, of the racism she experienced there. She couldn’t reconcile the media version of her Utah experience with what it became in real life. She couldn’t deal with the return to Louisiana, her homelessness, the anxiety, the feeling of being a failure at work and to her three kids. For Kathy, now 49, though the attention paid by most to the storm had all but faded, Katrina’s wake seemed stronger than ever.
Kathy was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia recently, and she now sees a psychiatrist once every three months. She said she’d grappled with some mental health issues before the storm, but the trauma of Katrina and the family’s displacement made those issues much worse. A few years ago, Kathy tried twice to end her own life.
“The separation of everybody, going through what she went through with the water … all of that played a part in whatever happened [to her],” said Kathy’s 28-year-old son, Jas, who now lives in California.
Kathy described her suicide attempts as her rock bottom. She’s no longer there, but her mental state has necessitated removing herself from her own story in other ways. She and her family no longer live in New Orleans, but are now 40 minutes outside of it in an area of sprawl called Violet that, were it not for its heat and humidity, could be mistaken for a place on the edge of virtually any other city in the United States. She no longer leaves the house except when absolutely necessary. The anxiety is too much.'
When Kathy Phipps was relocated to a suburban Utah neighborhood after the storm, she was hailed by the media as an example of how the tragedy could turn into opportunity. But 10 years later, Kathy is back in Louisiana, scarred by what happened after the cameras went away.
Science is, naturally, the never-ending pursuit of knowledge that has spanned the entirety of human existence and will continue, in some form, ad infinitum—but it’s incredible to see how much progress can be made in just a decade. With the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina this week in mind, NASA is showing off how much its ability to track and analyze hurricanes has improved in the few years since the devastating storm hit the Gulf Coast of the United States.
Here’s a satellite model of Hurricane Katrina’s wind speed from 2005:
(NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Bill Putman)
And here’s what that wind speed analysis would look like with 2015 technology:
(NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Bill Putman)
The model from 2005 used a 50-kilometer resolution, while current models boast a resolution of just over 6 km. Clearly, the data that satellites can now send are much more comprehensive than what was being transmitted in 2005. New technology has even allowed researchers to figure out better ways of predicting a storm’s intensity:
“It used to be that we always looked for the mechanisms that allow hurricanes to rapidly intensify, but as of late, the question has gotten flipped around,” said Scott Braun, a research meteorologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, which operates the satellites that track hurricanes. “Now we ask what are the factors that prevent a hurricane from intensifying.”
One of those factors, shown by the images above, is high wind shear, or “a large change in winds with height, in the storm’s environment.”
But it’s not just better tech that is helping NASA to track storms—it’s also that there’s a lot more of it. NASA says that, since Katrina, it and other agencies around the world have rapidly increased the number of sensors in space that can collect storm data. NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS) includes about a dozen active satellites studying the Earth’s weather and climate. Six of them, like CloudSat and CALIPSO, have launched in the last nine years a lone.
Below is a 2005 image of the water vapor within Hurricane Katrina, once again in 50-km resolution.
(NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Bill Putman)
And here’s that same view taken day by EOS Version 5 at 6-km resolution:
(NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Bill Putman)
These improvements, to put it simply, are huge. “For the intensity of a hurricane, so much comes down to the details of the really small processes and specifics in the inner core,” said Dan Cecil, a scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. We can’t stop hurricanes from happening (or can we?), but we now know a whole lot more about them than we did just 10 years ago. Hopefully that information will prevent widespread physical damage and, more importantly, save lives.
[Editor’s Note: By now, I’m sure many of you are celebrating the results of last night’s Hugo Awards! We’ll be publishing a roundup of this year’s winners soon, but in the meantime, here’s Marcy J. Cook on what the puppies stand for and the transphobia they demonstrated at this year’s Awards.]
If you are at all a Sci-Fi or Fantasy book-geek you know that the 2015 Hugo Awards were mired in controversy thanks to the actions of right wing conservatives, mostly older white guys. It’s a group that formed ‘Sad Puppies’ and it’s fraction spin-off the even more extreme ‘Rabid Puppies’. They aim to fight back against what they see as liberal bias in Sci-Fi and Fantasy towards women, LGBTQ and the mythic liberal agenda. Yes these are the terms the USA Republicans use too, this is because the puppies are mostly Americans so there is a lot of cross over in the rubric.
As the world has grown more progressive it has meant that the extreme-conservatives and white old guys have less control than they used to have. That is what this is about, a slight loosening of their grip. More women are winning awards, more PoC and people from the LGBTQ spectrum – in other words there is more acceptance of diversity. This has been reflected recently in the Hugo Awards, in particular women have been winning more Hugo Awards in the last few years. This is against everything that the puppies believe in.
Belief is the right term here, as the world the puppies yelp back to has never existed. They imagine a 1950’s era of white hetro male domination where all men-were-men and women existed only to be rescued, PoC knew their place and LGBTQ people didn’t even exist. This era in novels never existed of course, but why would mere facts stop the puppies? Reason certainly didn’t and neither did the concept of fairness.
The two puppy groups were not just trying to weight the Hugo Awards, or game it, they were out to break the Hugo’s. When the puppies gathered at Worldcon yesterday, the puppies were there to spread their particular brand of hate. Trigger warning for transphobia & abuse:
The slightly larger version is here, click to enlarge:
This was placed in a stack on the freebie table at Worldcon. I love Sci-Fi, I love fantasy, and I love reading and writing it ,too. What I don’t like is hatred. Puppies conflate free speech with the freedom to be abusive towards people they don’t agree with. It’s vile and the Hugo’s are going to struggle to recover from this. The puppies though don’t care about what the world thinks of the Hugo’s in the same manner as Trump’s wig doesn’t care about what it is riding on.
Just to prove that women can be as utterly transphobic as men, here’s how a puppy responded to the removal of the leaflets. She’s a writer I’ve never heard of, and I won’t give her publicity by using her name here; she uploaded more transphobic content and declared the leaflet “funny” and people opposed to ‘the freedom to abuse others’ as “devils”.
Thankfully the Hugo Award results backfired against the puppies and the hate speech they put out. The Hugos were watched more closely this year than ever before.
Marcy (@marcyjcook) is an immigrant trans woman and writer. This includes Transcanuck.com, a website dedicated to informing and helping trans Canadians. She also has a nerd job, too many cats, is a part time volunteer sex educator and has an ongoing sordid love affair with Lego. Those last two are not related… probably.
Removed a long series of posts and locking. Debate is absolutely OK on our site, but pointed statements about any member of our staff and the quality of their work as an employee is inappropriate and ultimately baiting for an argument (and to be clear, we're not cool with this kind of commentary directed at anyone in our community, whether they're from Paizo, a 3PP, or a fan). Some of the commentary here from a few sides was verging on outright toxic also. Read through our Community Guidelines before posting.
If neither slate of “Puppies” had forced its chosen works onto the ballot, the ballot would have looked like this:
Best Novel
- Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie - The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Anderson > The Three Body Problem, Liu Cixin - Lock In, John Scalzi - City of Stairs, Robert Jackson Bennett
The Three Body Problem edged out The Goblin Emperor in the first round by a mere 176 votes, followed by Ancillary Justice and Skin Game. Had slates not been part of the mix, John Scalzi’s Lock In and Robert Jackson Bennett’s City of Stairs also would have been on the ballot. Looking at the numbers, it’s looking likely that The Three Body Problem might have been helped by slate voters, pushing it over the edge.
When it came to Best Novella: No Award earned 3495 votes off the top, knocking every slate work off the ballot. Without the slate voters, the Best Novella ballot would have looked much different:
Best Novella
- The Slow Regard of Silent Things, Patrick Rothfuss - The Regular, Ken Liu - Yesterday’s Kin, Nancy Kress - Grand Jete (The Great Leap), Rachel Swirsky - The Mothers of Voorhisville, Mary Rickert
The Best Novelette category was awarded to Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s story, “The Day the World Turned Upside Down,” which earned an even 1700 votes to take the top spot, with No Award coming in second. Strip everything that earned a No Award away, and you’re left with works from Seanan McGuire, Ashante Wilson, Ruthana Emrys and Tom Crosshill as potential nominees.
Best Novelette
- The Day the World Turned Upside Down, Thomas Olde Heuvelt - Each to Each, Seanan McGuire - The Devil In America, Kai Ashante Wilson - The Litany of Earth, Ruthana Emrys - The Magician and Laplace’s Demon, Tom Crosshill
Best Short Story earned a No Award with 3053 votes, or 58% of the total. With each of the slate works knocked off, a final ballot would have looked like this:
Best Short Story
- Jackalope Wives, Ursula Vernon - The Breath of War, Aliette de Bodard - The Truth About Owls, Amal El-Mohtar - When it Ends, He Catches Her, Eugie Foster - A Kiss With Teeth, Max Gladstone
Another category entirely dominated by slated works was Best Related Work, which earned a No Award for the top place, which allows for an entirely new ballot:
Best Related Work
- What Makes This Book so Great, Jo Walton - Chicks Dig Gaming, Jennifer Brozek, Robert Smith, and Lars Pearson - Shadows Beneath: The Writing Excuses Anthology, Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, Howard Taylor - Invisible: Personal Essays on Representation in SF, Jim C. Hines - Tropes vs Women: Women as Background Decoration, Anita Sarkeesian
What I found striking about the Best Related Work is that it’s a solid demonstration of the limitations of slate voting. Books such as William Patterson’s Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2 and Karen Burnham’s entry for Greg Egan in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series, while not making the replacement ballot, might have been solid choices for more conservative readers. This did not happen, because the slates negated the real strength of the Hugo awards: the ability to draw votes from the entirety of fandom. Instead, they traded versatility for precision, and missed the target completely.
Carter Reid’s The Zombie Nation Book #2: Reduce Reuse Reanimate was the only slate work for Best Graphic Story, but it, along with Rat Queens and Sex Criminals, were outvoted by No Award. While this leaves Zombie Nation off a replacement list, the rest of the category is relatively intact.
Best Graphic Story
- Ms. Marvel Volume 1: No Normal, G. Willow Wilson, Adrian Alphona - Saga 3, Brian K Vaughan / Fiona Staples - Rat Queens Volume 1: Sass and Sorcery, Kurtis J. Weibe, Laura Tavishati, Roc Upchurch, Ed Brisson - Sex Criminals, Volume 1: One Weird Trick, Matt Fraction & Chip Zdarsky - Saga 4, Brian K. Vaughan / Fiona Staples
There seems to have been one place in which slate and non-slate voters agreed: movies. Slated works included Guardians of the Galaxy, Interstellar, The Lego Movie, and Captain America: Winter Soldier, each of which survived No Award. Likewise, Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, was a bit less muddled, but not decisively so. No Award earned a bottom spot, edging out Grimm, but slate picks for The Flash and Game of Thrones seemed to have enjoyed votes from both slate and non-slate voters. Ultimately, however, Orphan Black picked up the top award.
The short form editor category was overwhelmingly voted for No Award, with 2672 votes cast, at 55.1% of the total vote. If you remove the slate candidates, you end up with a list which matches the 2014 list and most of the 2013 list (the exception being Ellen Datlow).
Best Editor, Short Form
- John Joseph Adams - Neil Clarke - Ellen Datlow - Jonathan Strahan - Sheila Williams
Likewise, the Long Form editor award was voted No Award, at 50.9% of the total vote. A revised ballot looks similar to that of last year’s awards, except without Toni Weisskopf, who took second to No Award, and with Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Anne Perry joining the ballot this time around. (Last year’s ballot also included Ginjer Buchanan, who retired last year and wasn’t eligible this year).
Best Editor, Long Form
- Liz Gorinsky - Beth Meacham - Patrick Nielsen Hayden - Lee Harris - Anne Perry
For Best Professional Artist, Julie Dillon earned the top spot at 2570 votes, with slate artist Kirk Douponce earning second place at 600. The rest of the slated works fell under No Award. Without the slates, you get a whole different list of artists:
Best Professional Artist
- Julie Dillon - John Picacio - Galen Dara - Stephan Martiniere - Chris McGrath
When it came to the best Semiprozine, one slated publication asked to be removed, (Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show), while Abyss & Apex survived the No Award cut, but Andromeda Spaceways InFlight Magazine didn’t. Without slates, here’s what you get:
Best Semiprozine
- Lightspeed Magazine - Strange Horizons - Beneath Ceaseless Skies - The Book Smugglers - Interzone
In the Fanzine category, only the winning entry, Journey Planet, was not from a slate. Remove the slate picks, and you see a ballot that includes some publications from last year’s ballot making a return appearance:
Best Fanzine
- Journey Planet - The Drink Tank - Lady Business - File 770 - A Dribble of Ink
Likewise in Best Fancast, removing the three slated works (which were voted below No Award) would allow for The Coode Street Podcast, Verity! and The Skiffy and Fanty Show to join the replacement ballot:
Best Fancast
- Galactic Suburbia - Tea and Jeopardy - The Coode Street Podcast - Verity! - The Skiffy and Fanty Show
In “Best Fan Writer,” Laura J. Mixon was the sole non-slate entry in the category, and a number of other writers would have been included in the nominations otherwise:
Best Fan Writer
- Dave Freer - Larua J. Mixon - Abigail Nussbaum - Liz Bourke - Natalie Luhrs
The last Hugo category, best Fan Artist, there were no nominees from the slates, which would have allowed that ballot to remain intact in any case.
Finally, for the ‘Not a Hugo’ John W. Campbell award, Wesley Chu (the only non-slate nominee) earned the top spot with 60% of the vote with 2655 votes cast. Remove the slated authors, and you’ll find a whole new group:
John W. Campbell Award
- Wesley Chu - Andy Weir - Alyssa Wong - Carmen Maria Marchado - Django Wexler
Looking deeper into this replacement ballot, one sees right off the bat that the non-slate ballot would have been far more equal when it comes to gender representation, which brings it more in line with the ballots from 2014, 2013 and 2012. While the stated purpose of these nominating slates were to bring “actual science fiction and fantasy, rather than excellence in intersectional equalitarianism, racial and gender inclusion, literary pyrotechnics, or professional rabbitology,” before Hugo voters, they did so in a way that was purposefully discriminatory, while setting up their nominees for rejection from the larger fan community.
Last night, the Hugo Awards were handed out. And the fans rejected the attempt of a small minority to impose its ideology on the nominations via slate-voting. But last night, we also learned which works would have been on the ballot, if the nominations hadn’t been rigged.
'For those who haven't, Varg is a self-admitted neo-Nazi with convictions in France for inciting racial hatred against Jews and Muslims, someone whose idea of a fun time is burning down churches, and an actual no-shit convicted murderer who stabbed a band-mate to death.
Even if you collect bad games, please consider that any money spent on the game will go to a racist Nazi murderer.
Stew Wilson Werewolf: The * Developer, Onyx Path Publishing'
It's by Varg Vikernes, a name that may ring a bell to people who've been following the Scandinavian metal scene. I haven't read, let alone played, it and hopefully never will.
The boardgame industry is getting a huge boost from crowdsourcing. Five Thirty Eight has a really fascinating look at how sites like Kickstarter are helping to fuel a renaissance in gaming, and how getting funds from gamers directly allows designers to innovate and experiment.
TW: harassment, racism, and a deep dive into Vox Day/Theodore Beale
'In the five categories that had only Puppy-provided nominees on the ballot—Best Novella, Best Short Story, Best Related Work, and Best Editor for Short and for Long Form—voters instead preferred “No Award.”'
It's the result everyone wanted, but it still robs authors of recognition, something no amount of Scalzi's gloating will reverse. I'm still waiting for folks with profile to say, "If you didn't like that slate of writers and editors, here's people you should read and hire because their work was amazing."
...
'Laura J. Mixon, who won for Best Fan Writer, gave by far the most stirring speech. Her winning blog post had meticulously described the venomous behavior of a female, left-leaning troll (an Internet troll, not a troll-troll). “There’s room for all of us here,” Mixon said. “But there’s no middle ground between ‘We belong here’ and ‘No you don’t.’ I believe we must find non-toxic ways to discuss our conflicting points of view.” In closing, Mixon, who is white, added, “I stand with people from marginalized groups who seek simply to be seen as fully human. Black lives matter.”'
...
“I have 390 sworn and numbered vile faceless minions—the hardcore shock troops—who are sworn to mindless and perfect obedience,” Beale said, acknowledging that his army wasn’t made up solely of sci-fi fans. On the contrary, “the people who are very anti-SJW said, ‘Okay, we want to get in on this.’” When I asked him how he might deploy those people in the future, he continued, “It’s very simple. The dark lord speaks, the minion acts.”
...
'The Puppies aren’t the only ones who think so. While waiting for Sasquan’s annual Masquerade costume competition to begin Friday night, I overheard a man clad all in tie-dye tell his tie-dye swathed companion something very similar: “I like the type of books the Puppies were promoting. I just don’t like the way they did it.”
Annie Bellet would agree. The 34-year-old writer of self-published urban fantasy novels (among other things) had a short story, “Goodnight Stars,” on both the Sad and Rabid Puppies slates and received her first Hugo nomination this year at least partly because of it. But 11 days later, she turned the nomination down.
In a sometimes emotional interview in the convention hall this week (her first, she said, since the controversy), Bellet told me she was not “bullied by ‘the SJWs’ into turning down my nomination,” as some in the community have said. The reason she withdrew: “I love the Hugo Awards. To be nominated was awesome. But I’m a writer. That’s what I want my public face to be. I don’t want people to think of me as some political figure, or some ball in the political game.”
For Bellet, the Sad Puppies aren’t abstractions—they’re people she actually knows. She thinks Correia is a “great guy” and loves his seven-book Monster Hunter series. And she once considered Torgersen an ally. They met in a workshop. “We came up as baby writers together. We were friends—and I’m using the past tense,” she said, wiping away tears. “He’s hurt a lot of people.”
Blonde-haired, fair-skinned, and “covered in tattoos,” Bellet is from Portland, Oregon. “I’m adopted, and I have a sister who is black, a sister who’s Vietnamese. My mom is a lesbian. I grew up in a liberal, inclusive environment. Still, I broke a lot of noses [after hearing] the N-word growing up, trying to defend my little sister. So I do not understand this white persecution narrative.”
Bellet said she thinks Beale “rode” Correia and Torgersen “like ponies. I told Brad that. He said, ‘Just because we’re on the freeway in different cars heading the same direction doesn’t mean we’re together.’ I said, ‘Dude, you’re in the same car, and Vox Day is driving.’ He doesn’t get it. It makes me so sad.”
What’s more, for the record, she doesn’t think Beale, who folded much of the Sad Puppies slate into his own, even read her story. “I’m everything Vox Day doesn’t like—which I consider a badge of honor,” she told me. “I’m a queer female writing about shape-shifters—that fantasy ‘crap’ that’s not ‘real’ science fiction.” Here’s the thing she thinks Beale doesn’t grasp, she said: “Nerd culture brings everybody together. People don’t care what you look like. If you want to be a black Khaleesi, go for it!”'
I remember, when the Hugo nominations came out, Brad Torgersen crowed that the Puppies had taken over the Enterprise.
So, to extend the metaphor, this is what happened to the Puppies last night at the Hugo Awards:
And if you remember, afterwards the Federation built the Enterprise back up again, just as good as, if not better than, before. So, yes.
I’ll have more and longer things to say on the topic, but right now I’m operating on a deficit of sleep thanks to George RR Martin’s epic Hugo Loser’s party, so I’m going to take a nap before my event in Fort Collins (today! At 3!).
In the meantime, if you want more detail on events, this Wired article (in which I am quoted) is pretty comprehensive, and this Wall Street Journal article features immediate post-Hugo reactions from me and several others.
Comments off because of nap, followed by several hours of me being busy at an event. My upcoming longer entry (probably within the next couple of days) will have the comments open. Hold your fire until then.
CDC to 40 Million Contact Lens Wearers: You're Doing It Wrong NBCNews.com Nearly 41 million American adults wear contact lenses and virtually every single one is doing something to get germs in their eyes, a new federal survey shows. And they're paying for it. Nearly a third admit they've gone to a doctor because of red or ...
World's first swimming pool bridge BBC News Plans to build a 25 metre swimming pool, that will join two 10 storey tower blocks, have been announced. The pool will have a see-through bottom so that people using it can peer down to the ground as they swim. It will be 35 metres up in the air and ...
When they tell you that both sides are the same, they are lying to you. If it were true, why is it that the wealthy give so much money to Republican Candidates?
Now, I know you are going to point out that Hillary Clinton is also on the list. First, note how far down the list her first donor is. This is called Hedging your bets. You give tons of money to the people that you want to win. You then hedge your bets by giving a smaller, yet still substantial, amount of money to the politician that will follow your will most closely from the opposition party.
It insures that you cannot lose.
You either get a very regressive President, who will do almost anything you want. Or you get a slightly regressive President, who will do most of what you want.
'On Friday in Kansas City, Missouri, Dave Grohl and his rock band rode on the back of a pickup truck near Sprint Center and blasted Rick Astley's spectacularly cheesy 1987 pop hit "Never Gonna Give You Up" in front of a crowd of protesters from the Westboro Baptist Church who arrived to picket against their concert that night.'
Super Opinionated.
