Riot are teaming up with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as part of their research into player behaviour and teamwork. This time they’re looking to explore “the ability of a team to perform a wide range of collaborative tasks” and want your help.
Posting on the League of Legends forums, Jeffrey Lin (lead designer of social systems) explained a little more about what will be involved in the online study and to seek out participants.
To be eligible to take part you’ll need to be part of a ranked 5s team (3s aren’t being considered at this point but there’s scope for that to change in the future) and have played 20 games or more together on the North American server. The post says the games should be from this season but Lin has since clarified that they can span multiple seasons as long as the five has played them as a unit.
Participants will need to complete a 20 minute-ish online screening survey before going on to the main study. The exact details are being kept deliberately vague – you don’t want to let teams research the tasks or prepare beforehand – but the tasks will be a series of puzzles and exercises, all in English at the moment, that take about an hour.
On completion the team will get a scorecard showing its collective ability in terms of decision-making, execution, sensing and memory, and a reward on each member’s main summoner account.
As for what actually happens with the data, MIT will be working on a paper so the data (in summary form, so not personally identifiable) and results will eventually be made public. Presumably Riot will incorporate any useful findings into their own systems or potentially use them as part of their anti-toxic community drives.
If you’re curious there’s a signup sheet where you can register your interest.
Pomplamoose just finished a 28-day tour. We played 24 shows in 23 cities around the United States. It was awesome: Nataly crowd surfed for the first time ever, we sold just under $100,000 in tickets, and we got to rock out with people we love for a full month. We sold 1129 tickets in San Francisco at the Fillmore. I’ll remember that night for the rest of my life.
One question that our fans repeatedly asked us was “what does it feel like to have ‘made it’ as a band?” Though it’s a fair question to ask of a band with a hundred million views on YouTube, the thought of Pomplamoose having “made it” is, to me, ridiculous.
Before I write another sentence, it’s important to note that Nataly and I feel so fortunate to be making music for a living. Having the opportunity to play music as a career is a dream come true. But the phrase “made it” does not properly describe Pomplamoose. Pomplamoose is “making it.” And every day, we bust our asses to continue “making it,” but we most certainly have not “made it.”
Our van and trailer at our studio in the North Bay.
Being in an indie band is running a never-ending, rewarding, scary, low-margin small business. In order to plan and execute our Fall tour, we had to prepare for months, slowly gathering risk and debt before selling a single ticket. We had to rent lights. And book hotel rooms. And rent a van. And assemble a crew. And buy road cases for our instruments. And rent a trailer. And….
All of that required an upfront investment from Nataly and me. We don’t have a label lending us “tour support.” We put those expenses right on our credit cards. $17,000 on one credit card and $7,000 on the other, to be more specific. And then we planned (or hoped) to make that back in ticket sales.
The band and crew that travelled with us on our Fall 2014 tour.
We also knew that once we hit the road, we would be paying our band and crew on a weekly basis. One week of salaries for four musicians and two crew members (front of house engineer and tour manager) cost us $8794. That came out to $43,974 for the tour.
We built the tour budget ourselves and modeled projected revenue against expenses. Neither of us had experience with financial modeling, so we just did the best we could. With six figures of projected expenses, “the best we could” wasn’t super comforting.
The tour ended up costing us $147,802 to produce and execute. Where did all those expenses come from? I’m glad you asked:
Expenses
$26,450
Production expenses: equipment rental, lights, lighting board, van rental, trailer rental, road cases, backline.
$17,589
Hotels, and food. Two people per room, 4 rooms per night. Best Western level hotels, nothing fancy. 28 nights for the tour, plus a week of rehearsals.
$11,816
Gas, airfare, parking tolls. Holy shit, parking a 42-foot van is expensive.
$5445
Insurance. In case we break someone’s face while crowdsurfing.
$48,094
Salaries and per diems. Per diems are twenty dollar payments to each bandmate and crew member each day for food while we’re out. Think mechanized petty cash.
$21,945
Manufacturing merchandise, publicity (a radio ad in SF, Facebook ads, venue specific advertising), supplies, shipping.
$16,463
Commissions. Our awesome booking agency, High Road Touring, takes a commission for booking the tour. They deserve every penny and more: booking a four week tour is a huge job. Our business management takes a commission as well to do payroll, keep our finances in order, and produce the awesome report that lead to this analysis. Our lawyer, Kia Kamran, declined his commission because he knew how much the tour was costing us. Kia is the man.
Fortunately, Pomplamoose made some money to offset some of these expenses. Let’s look at our income from the tour:
Income
$97,519
Our cut of ticket sales. Dear fans, you are awesome. We love every ounce of your bodies. You’re the reason we can tour. Literally, 72% of our tour income came from the tickets you bought. THANK YOU.
The Aladdin Theater in Portland. Our first show of the tour.
$29,714
Merch sales. Hats, t-shirts, CDs, posters. 22% of our tour income.
$8,750
Sponsorship from Lenovo. Thank goodness for Lenovo! They gave us three laptops (to run our light show) and a nice chunk of cash. We thanked them on stage for saving our asses and supporting indie music. Some people think of brand deals as “selling out.” My guess is that most of those people are hobby musicians, not making a living from their music, or they’re rich and famous musicians who don’t need the income. If you’re making a living as an indie band, a tour sponsor is a shining beacon of financial light at the end of a dark tunnel of certain bankruptcy.
The Bottom Line
Add it up, and that’s $135,983 in total income for our tour. And we had $147,802 in expenses.
We lost $11,819.
Pomplamoose at the Fillmore in San Francisco. October 11th, 2014. Photo by Kassie Borreson.
But this isn’t a sob story. We knew it would be an expensive endeavor, and we still chose to make the investment. We could have played a duo show instead of hiring six people to tour with us. That would have saved us over $50,000, but it was important at this stage in Pomplamoose’s career to put on a wild and crazy rock show. We wanted to be invited back to every venue, and we wanted our fans to bring their friends next time. The loss was an investment in future tours.
Crowdsurfing somewhere in the middle of the country.
Rock and Roll.
At the end of the day, Pomplamoose is just fine: our patrons give us $6,326 per video through our Patreon page. We sell about $5,000 of music per month through iTunes and Loudr. After all of our expenses (yes, making music videos professionally is expensive), Nataly and I each draw a salary of about $2500 per month from Pomplamoose. What’s left gets reinvested in the band or saved so that we don’t have to rack up $24,000 of credit card debt to book another tour.
In 2014 Nataly and I didn’t take weekends off. Releasing two, fully produced music videos per month is way more than a full time job. Because Pomplamoose doesn’t have a manager, Nataly coordinated the logistics of the tour, herself. On top of that, we recorded and released a full length album. Our music video shoots often started at 9 am and finished at 2 am. That was the norm, not the exception.
Behind the Scenes of our video for “Puttin’ on the Ritz”
The point of publishing all the scary stats is not to dissuade people from being professional musicians. It’s simply an attempt to shine light on a new paradigm for professional artistry.
We’re entering a new era in history: the space between “starving artist” and “rich and famous” is beginning to collapse. YouTube has signed up over a million partners (people who agree to run ads over their videos to make money from their content). The “creative class” is no longer emerging: it’s here, now.
We, the creative class, are finding ways to make a living making music, drawing webcomics, writing articles, coding games, recording podcasts. Most people don’t know our names or faces. We are not on magazine covers at the grocery store. We are not rich, and we are not famous.
We are the mom and pop corner store version of “the dream.” If Lady Gaga is McDonald’s, we’re Betty’s Diner. And we’re open 24/7.
We have not “made it.” We’re making it.
Pomplamoose at Terminal West in Atlanta, Georgia. October 1st, 2014
A tiny monkey named Abu relentlessly teases a very tolerant, if not slightly perplexed, cat named Wasya while hanging upside down and from a swinging tree vine at their home in Nepal. Poor Wasya gets her shots in while she can, but little Abu is far more agile and leaves the poor feline in the dust. Perhaps Abu was just getting back at Wasya for previously not waking up when he wanted to play, but according to their human Nikita Karki the two of them are the best of friends.
The play continues onto a wooden lattice, where Wasya gains the upper hand, if only just for a moment.
After prosecutor Robert McCulloch announced the Ferguson grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown, a night of clashes between police and protesters produced burning police cars, blocked highways, and automatic gunfire. Amid all the unrest, is it possible to get a clear look at some of the racial and political tensions that underlie the Ferguson conflict?
I studied this question using a platform which has has played a major role throughout events in Ferguson: Twitter. Twitter has been used to disseminate live (and sometimes inaccurate) information about Ferguson, organize protests, and even to cyberattack the KKK. In the days before the no-indictment decision, I collected a sample of more than 200,000 tweets related to Ferguson, and they painted a stark picture of how divided people were.
In the image at the top, each point is one of the most talkative tweeters, and two points are connected if one mentions the other: in essence, the image depicts the social network of who talks to whom. It shows two clearly divided groups[1].
Who are these groups? Group membership is strongly connected with political party: tweeters who describe themselves as “conservative” (or using similar adjectives) are disproportionately likely to be in the red group, and tweeters who describe themselves as “liberal” are disproportionately likely to be in the blue group. Group membership is also connected with race: tweeters whose profiles contain “African-American”, or similar adjectives, are far more likely to be in the blue group.
So, when it comes to Ferguson, two groups with very different political and racial backgrounds ignore each other. This seems likely to cause problems, and in fact it does. For one thing, the two groups think drastically different things. Here are the most common things retweeted by each group:
The red group says they would feel safer meeting Darren Wilson than Michael Brown, and says that Brown was armed when he was shot; the blue group sarcastically contrasts Darren Wilson with the unarmed Michael Brown. The red group talks about mob justice and race baiting; the blue group talks about breaking the system. The red group blames Obama for exacerbating tensions and forcing the Missouri governor into declaring a state of emergency; the blue group says the state of emergency must not be used to violate human rights.
So maybe if everyone would just talk to each other they would get along? Not necessarily: when the red and blue group did talk, it often wasn’t pretty. Consider the things said by members of the red group to one of the most influential members of the blue group – DeRay Mckesson, a school administrator who has played a central role in organizing protests. They described him as a “commie boy” who spread hate (like the “democrats, the blacks, and the left…the new KKK”), saw “value in racist drivel”, was armed with “guns and Molotov cocktails”, and should get his “meds adjusted”.
So we have two groups of people who rarely communicate, have very different backgrounds, think drastically different things, and often spray vitriol at each other when they do talk. Previous studies of Twitter have found similar echo chambers, the Israel-Palestine conflict offering one representative example. It is unclear to what extent Twitter merely reflects social divisions as opposed to causing them; I find it unlikely that Mckesson and the red tweeters would be friends if they met over beers. But even this preliminary analysis does not bode well for the possibility of reconciliation.
[1] It is worth noting that one can always split groups down further and the appropriate number of groups is often debated. In this case, when we split groups further, the red group remains a single group but the blue group, which is larger, splits into multiple groups.
Over the last few weeks, billionaire and former tech executive Mark Cuban has become increasingly vocal on the subject of net neutrality. In an interview with The Washington Post yesterday, Cuban said that he was in favor of creating "fast lanes" on the internet that would ensure the quality of certain services. He’s a man who has always had plenty of opinions, and he’s certainly entitled to them, but in this case, it’s worth pointing out what a hypocritical asshat he sounds like, pushing a position that would have been a death blow to the very startup that made him so rich in the first place.
The bulk of Mr. Cuban’s wealth comes from the sale of a company he created, Broadcast.com. How did he build that company? To quote Wikipedia:
In 1995, Cuban and fellow Indiana University alumnus Todd Wagner started Audionet, combining their mutual interest in Indiana Hoosier college basketball and webcasting. With a single server and an ISDN line, Audionet became Broadcast.com in 1998. By 1999, Broadcast.com had grown to 330 employees and $13.5 million in revenue for the second quarter. In 1999, during the dot com boom, Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.7 billion in Yahoo! stock.
Permision-less innovation is what we have now
This is the picture-perfect example of the permission-less innovation that the internet has fostered. A pair of entrepreneurs had an idea and built it using a set of free, open protocols that connected them to tens of millions of consumers. How well would this same idea have worked in a world full of dedicated "fast lanes" on the internet? Terribly.
In a world where companies are allowed to pay to prioritize their data over others, consumers will naturally gravitate toward the services that work best. One of the biggest pain points for data flowing over the internet will be streaming video, especially live video, exactly the kind of thing Broadcast.com specialized in. If ESPN and the NFL can afford to pay for priority lanes to deliver their data, what chance does a young startup with limited cash really stand?
Cuban, in arguing for fast lanes, sites a few benevolent uses that might justify special treatment. Priority for data to doctors using apps or for machine vision technology that would help the blind to surf the web. No doubt these are noble ideas, but in a world where fast lanes are legal, every corporate entity with a profit motive will take advantage of them.
Cuban reveals his naked self-interest
In fact, later on in the interview, after the bit about doctors and computer vision, Cuban, who owns the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, slips off the mask and reveals his naked self-interest. When asked about services that stream data which doesn’t count against a user's monthly cap, he replied, "If T-Mobile came to me and asked me if I wanted to subsidize their consumers getting [Dallas] Mavs games streamed live over their phones or to mobile home routers, without impacting their data caps, I would love it, if the price was right, and would do it in a heartbeat."
Let’s slow down for emphasis here. Cuban is saying he wants to pay for certain data to get preferential treatment, so sports fans can enjoy Mavericks basketball without it counting against their data, much like T-Mobile's current streaming music offering. If Broadcast.com was a new startup today, and consumers were choosing between the Mavericks game on a T-mobile sports app and the one on Broadcast.com that would eat up their data plan, which one do you think they would choose?
Ayn Rand must be spinning in her grave
Cuban, like so many successful, self-centered asshats, is a devotee of Ayn Rand and her writings on Objectivism. He has often argued for the purest form of laissez-faire capitalism, in which the best ideas and execution win out, free from onerous government rules and regulations. Net neutrality, he assures us, would enrage Rand and will ruin the internet, just like government intervention wrecked the railroads.
But here’s the thing: our internet service providers don’t exist in a true free market. Cable providers and telecom companies function like utilities in many respects, with a single provider blessed by the government to tear up the roads and move through private property to lay the infrastructure needed to deliver this data. That’s why President Obama, among others, has called for the FCC to reclassify broadband internet service as a utility. And it's why Verizon, when it needs to lay fiber for its FiOS service, calls itself a Title II common carrier, in order to get taxpayer subsidies and rights of way for construction.
Cuban fails to grasp Net Neutrality's true meaning
What Cuban and many others fail to grasp is that net neutrality has always been about ensuring those monopolistic internet providers don’t play favorites. Open internet advocates don’t want things to change, but rather to stay the same. Net neutrality has always been about preventing rich incumbents from stomping out new ideas. It’s actually about fostering just the kind of world Cuban and Rand claim to love. It’s shameful that a man who benefited so greatly from that level playing field is now advocating to destroy it.
'As the game progresses, it hints at details about Ajay’s personal life, but they’re mostly buried in bits of text, where a game puts something it doesn’t find interesting enough to tell you in its story. Ajay’s family drama takes a backseat to Ajay’s kicking ass and taking no names, because taking names would imply a fleck of humanity, of which Ajay has none. He was built to be boring, to get out of the player’s way.
One character in particular has really stuck with me as a weird inversion of Ajay. A powerful woman, you learn, is running a violent gladiatorial pit in which dozens if not hundreds of people and animals have died. Her motivation: the dwindling hope that she can save her parents who she believes have been taken captive. In an early scene, we see how heavy a burden this bloody job is on her sanity as she weeps and allows herself to be vulnerable.
Ajay, ever the pragmatist, chides the woman. But her behavior — killing in the hope she’ll save the lives of her family — is far more justifiable than killing to scatter some ashes in the right spot. Of all the people in Kyrat, you are the quickest to kill in the coldest, most gruesome ways, but you have the flimsiest justification. That’s why you’re in the middle of this. It’s as if the characters know if you’re on their side, they’re guaranteed to win.
I’m beginning to get the sense that some people who make games about shooting people have anxiety about the very experience of playing them. And that this anxiety is expressing itself, intentionally or not, in the games’ characters and stories. Since Spec Ops: The Line, we’ve seen more and more narratives that can be reduced to, "The only way to win is to not play." From Grand Theft Auto V and The Last of Us to the Call of Duty franchise, you can assume one scene where the game forces you to do something particularly grim, tacitly implicating you as accessory in its bloody enterprise.
But I want to play. I love first-person shooters, despite my disgust with their jingoistic themes, their general support of unfettered militarism, and the obvious fact that you spend most of their campaigns trying to shoot people in the face so you can conserve enough ammo and shoot more people in the face. I just can’t stop playing them, and so I’ve become increasingly fascinated with their bizarre, interior logic that seems to hypnotize me into a state of comfort.'
Far Cry 4 is a beautiful, meticulously designed video game about shooting most of the people you meet
First-person shooters are notorious for the paper-thin motivations of their heroes — typically, muscular bald men who will execute an entire continent if someone puts their country in danger or stuffs their female colleague in a fridge. To step around the moral glue trap of a genre that relies on casual murder, many game developers quickly bury their excuse in a compact expository monologue, or they just make the villains Nazis or zombies. Because those, culturally speaking, are equally subhuman and okay for the killing.
In the latest Far Cry, a franchise set in exotic locations where you kill exotic cultures, dozens of hours of thrill-killing are justified by a comically grim internal logic: you wish to spread your dead mother’s ashes, showing respect to her final wish. Which is to say, you kill hundreds to show respect for one.
What makes Far Cry 4 unique is how the characters in the world itself seem to understand the real reason you’re here, the true motivation: you want to kill a lot of people for fun. Unlike Far Cry 3, the new game doesn’t bother with an explanation for why you’re so good at slaughtering humans by the village-full. It simply provides you the necessary materials, and dozens of missions and random moments to be a hero and shoot a man.
And yet, there’s a chance Far Cry 4 will be the game I recommend as my Game of the Year because its world is so grand and beautifully crafted, and I want to spend days floating through its sky, gliding across its rivers, and, yes, shooting countless humans and animals. Which is just so fucked up whenever I spend more than five seconds thinking about it. And I can’t stop thinking about it.
As an American named Ajay Ghale, you return to your presumed birthplace of Kyrat, a fictional stand-in for the nations of the Himalayas. The country — composed mostly of rich forests and mountains, spotted with temples, villages, and shrines — has been pulverized by decades of political unrest. In the place of an ancient age of posterity there is now a power vacuum waiting to be filled by one of a half dozen or so morally questionable women and men.
Far Cry 4’s warmest, most morally justified characters are still violent, selfish, and power-hungry, each of them drawn from the BioShock school of thought where all sides of an argument are equally bad, and there’s no real winning, just losing less. They’re shrewd parodies of philosophical ideals.
A franchise set in exotic locations where you kill exotic cultures
Everyone in this world lives to be judged: a pseudo-pastor obsessed with guns, as if they’re divine objects; a philosophical guru who wants to heal the land, but not before showing you a bloody animal sacrifice; the would-be empowered female heroine determined to save her country with an industrialized drug trade. No one can be trusted, screams the game with the caffeinated nihilism of Nietzsche lecturing at the X-Games.
Ajay, our voice in the game, takes a patronizing tone when he speaks to these people who provide him the guns, ammo, and reason to kill hundreds of people in an incredibly confusing civil war. He doesn’t ask for questions or details, nor does he make the obvious point that none of this has to do with his very simple desire to respect his dead mom. Occasionally, he scoffs at their requests and wacky logic. These people are crazy, he’ll say in so many words. Then he’ll reload his rocket launcher and shoot a helicopter out of the sky.
It’s hysterical, because despite Ajay’s scorn and snobbish tone, there’s a clear reason they’re coming to him: he’s a psychopath who can kill better than anyone else.
As the game progresses, it hints at details about Ajay’s personal life, but they’re mostly buried in bits of text, where a game puts something it doesn’t find interesting enough to tell you in its story. Ajay’s family drama takes a backseat to Ajay’s kicking ass and taking no names, because taking names would imply a fleck of humanity, of which Ajay has none. He was built to be boring, to get out of the player’s way.
One character in particular has really stuck with me as a weird inversion of Ajay. A powerful woman, you learn, is running a violent gladiatorial pit in which dozens if not hundreds of people and animals have died. Her motivation: the dwindling hope that she can save her parents who she believes have been taken captive. In an early scene, we see how heavy a burden this bloody job is on her sanity as she weeps and allows herself to be vulnerable.
I want to know what keeps me coming back
Ajay, ever the pragmatist, chides the woman. But her behavior — killing in the hope she’ll save the lives of her family — is far more justifiable than killing to scatter some ashes in the right spot. Of all the people in Kyrat, you are the quickest to kill in the coldest, most gruesome ways, but you have the flimsiest justification. That’s why you’re in the middle of this. It’s as if the characters know if you’re on their side, they’re guaranteed to win.
I’m beginning to get the sense that some people who make games about shooting people have anxiety about the very experience of playing them. And that this anxiety is expressing itself, intentionally or not, in the games’ characters and stories. Since Spec Ops: The Line, we’ve seen more and more narratives that can be reduced to, "The only way to win is to not play." From Grand Theft Auto V and The Last of Us to the Call of Duty franchise, you can assume one scene where the game forces you to do something particularly grim, tacitly implicating you as accessory in its bloody enterprise.
But I want to play. I love first-person shooters, despite my disgust with their jingoistic themes, their general support of unfettered militarism, and the obvious fact that you spend most of their campaigns trying to shoot people in the face so you can conserve enough ammo and shoot more people in the face. I just can’t stop playing them, and so I’ve become increasingly fascinated with their bizarre, interior logic that seems to hypnotize me into a state of comfort.
Simply, I want to know what keeps me coming back.
I’ve written about the shallow ultra violence of BioShock Infinite and the mind-numbing consistency of the Call of Duty franchise. But both have a blunt almost purposeful stupidity to them, clearly meant to feed a meathead market. Far Cry 4 is quite incredible in its gruesomeness, in that it seems both naively at peace with the paper-thin justification it gives the player to kill with such regularity, and yet also utterly exhausted with itself and violent video games. It’s as if the game was built by two teams on opposite sides of the planet, which, to be fair, it was in some degree, as the publisher Ubisoft is notorious for spreading development on its big budget titles across the globe.
Halfway through the game, a mission required me to kill a man who I later learned was a decoy. A voice came over the radio, trying to make me feel bad for killing the wrong man. Finally, the game was judging me, but I didn’t feel much of anything. What option did I have? All I could do was follow the script.
'Wow, Prince's @3rdEyeGirl Twitter account is gone. (Along with his YouTube & Facebook accounts.) Interesting!
Meanwhile, the music on his Soundcloud page has been pulled and his VEVO account on YouTube now only has three clips, including the video for the single "Breakfast Can Wait." However, the artist's Instagram account is still active as of this writing.'
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The hackers who took down Sony Pictures' computer systems yesterday say that they are working for "equality" and suggest that their attack was assisted or carried out by Sony employees. In an email responding to inquiries from The Verge, a person identifying as one of the hackers writes, "We Want equality [sic]. Sony doesn't. It's an upward battle." The hackers' goals remain unclear, but they used the attack yesterday to specifically call out Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton, referring to him as a "criminal" in a tweet.
"We worked with other staff with similar interests to get in."
The hackers claim to have taken sensitive internal data from Sony. In the email, a hacker who identified as "lena" was vague about how the attack was carried out. "Sony doesn't lock their doors, physically, so we worked with other staff with similar interests to get in," lena writes. "Im sorry I can't say more, safety for our team is important [sic]." The phrasing is ambiguous, but it suggests that the hackers, if not colleagues of the hackers, claim to be employed by Sony in some fashion.
As a result of the hack, Sony Pictures employees walked into work yesterday to find the image of a glowing red skeleton on their computer. The image was covered with the phrase "Hacked by #GOP," beneath which was a list of instructions and demands. The note said that Sony was already aware of the group's demands and that the group would release Sony's "secrets and top secrets" if they did not comply by last night. That does not appear to have happened. Deadline reports that Sony's computer systems remain down today across the globe.
It appears that the hackers may have taken a large swath of data off of an internal Sony computer system. The hackers' note to employees includes a link to files that describe what has been taken and can be released. Much of it is not sensitive — like podcasts and promotional stills — but it's possible that sensitive documents are mixed in among the files. Notably, the hackers also identify themselves, at least by pseudonym and email address, among the mix of documents. One file says that the hack was carried out by the "Guardians of Peace," and includes disposable email addresses for seven different names.
Sony, so far, has not commented in any manner of detail on the hack. Last night it said that it was "investigating an IT matter." In an updated statement today, a spokesperson tells Deadline that "Sony Pictures Entertainment experienced a system disruption, which are working diligently to resolve [sic]."
Bees are disappearing—that much is certain. What's unclear is why. Pathogens and pesticides have been posited as potential causes, as has the loss of bees' preferred floral resources. This last reason has intuitive appeal: wildflowers are disappearing because of agriculture, and bees rely on the pollen and nectar in flowers, so the loss of flowers should be causing the loss of bees.
But a demonstration of this seemingly simple idea has been hard to come by. Different species of bees rely on different plants—the bee species that are disappearing have never been analyzed in terms of taste for the plants that are disappearing to see if they match up. And, once the bees or plants are gone, it's hard to figure out what relationship (if any) they might have had. Pesky details.
Researchers in the Netherlands have gotten around this problem by examining museum specimens of bees to figure out which bees like which flowers. They've demonstrated that the bee species that have declined are in fact those that like the pollen from flower species that have also declined.
“Why did Michael Brown, an 18-year-old kid headed to college, refuse to move from the middle of the street to the sidewalk? Why would he curse out a police officer? Why would he attack a police officer? Why would he dare a police officer to shoot him? Why would he charge a police officer holding a gun? Why would he put his hand in his waistband while charging, even though he was unarmed?
None of this fits with what we know of Michael Brown. Brown wasn’t a hardened felon. He didn’t have a death wish. And while he might have been stoned, this isn’t how stoned people act. The toxicology report did not indicate he was on PCP or something that would’ve led to suicidal aggression.
Which doesn’t mean Wilson is a liar. Unbelievable things happen every day. The fact that his story raises more questions than it answers doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
But the point of a trial would have been to try to answer these questions. We would have either found out if everything we thought we knew about Brown was wrong, or if Wilson’s story was flawed in important ways. But now we’re not going to get that chance. We’re just left with Wilson’s unbelievable story.”
theres mounds of folks calling out the anarchists in Ferguson
shit. i just… fuck!
They pulled this shit at some of the Trayvon Martin marches, too. Wherever black people are putting their lives on the line out of righteous anger, privileged little white fucks are somewhere nearby putting those people’s lives in danger for kicks.
Problem B: An alarm clock is not a fun gift for anyone. Alarm clocks exist to make you get out of bed and no amount of bad super hero art can make that a GOOD GIFT.
I don’t even want Darren Wilson’s head. Honestly, he’s a pawn in something bigger than him. He can rot in hell or hiding or wherever. What I want is for everyone to stop questioning the anger, the frustration, the heartbreak, and the validated feelings of sorrow of black people. Stop pretending to empathize with us. Stop pretending to understand our sadness, our feelings of worthlessness, our feelings of hopelessness, and our wanting to be valued as humans. When I talk about race and the way I feel against white supremacy, and you tell me it’s because I’m jealous, you’re damn right. I’m jealous that I can’t even be seen as worthy of living in a society that was built against me in all ways possible. So fuck you if you want to know why I’m whitegirlsaintshit.
I blinked one day and when I opened my eyes, it was normal to have an American army battling Americans on American streets. No one even calls it a war. But it is.
Indian artist Aarthi Parthasarathy has a new comic called “Royal Existentials”. It’s made of images from vintage Indian Mughal miniature paintings, an art form that dates back to at least the sixteenth century.
I heard about it from this article, where she mentions where she got the idea:
A web-comic fan herself, Parthasarathy was inspired by Wondermark, a comic strip series created by California artist David Malki that has Victorian-era drawings with funny dialogues added in. So, she set out to create something similarly humorous but utterly Indian.
For the series, Parthasarathy picks existing images of Indian miniature paintings and writes contemporary dialogues to them focusing on the joke and the punchline. The social commentary is incidental. “It started out as a way to just have fun with images,” she said. “After the first three, I suddenly realised that this is becoming very social, very feminist.”
I think that’s super turbo cool. Keep at it, Aarthi!! My one note is that I wish the comics were bigger on the site so they’re easier to read!
When we talk about androgynous fashion, we usually mean female-presenting people in outfits that incorporate or echo menswear. One seldom sees male-presenting people doing the same with womenswear, at least in the mainstream.
I think some of that must be a side effect of the privileging of traits, roles, and characteristics associated with masculinity over those associated with femininity—a woman in masculine-associated roles or clothing is moving in the direction of higher status and increased social privilege, at least implicitly; a man in feminine-associated roles or clothing, lower. We associate women in menswear with freedom and assertion; men in womenswear with deviation, grotesquerie, and parody.
I’ve been organizing and speaking at conferences for years. I always mainstreamed myself because I didn’t know what conferences would look like if I let myself be deaf. I was afraid they wouldn’t look like anything — that my choices were either to mainstream myself… or not go to conferences at all.
Now that I’ve tried having ASL interpreters and CART at 3 academic conferences, I can confidently say:
Accessibility is a stressful, multi-week/multi-month pain in the butt to set up.
It is so much better than mainstreaming myself that I don’t ever want to go to a conference without accessibility again.
Because you know what people do at conferences? They talk. They meet each other, share ideas, network, eat together, congregate in hallways and exhibit halls and chat. This blew my mind. I used to go to conferences, talk with a few people I already knew in 1:1 situations, deliver my talks, maybe go to a friend’s talk for support, and then collapse in my hotel room and stare at the ceiling.
So.
Dear World: If I spend the next 5 years of my life working on accessibility — helping my colleagues and conferences and institutions and so forth set up things like captioning and interpreters, learning Yet Another Foreign Language (ASL) and getting electronics drilled into my skull (hybrid cochlear implant) and re-learning how to process sound like a baby, tinker with flashing doorbells and reading up on disability theory and making peace with my relationship(s) with d/Deaf culture(s) and coaching friends and family through How To Please Communicate With Mel, and… all these things –
…will you pick up at least some of the burden for the 50+ years of my career (and more importantly, life) after that, so I can rest, and breathe, and be with friends, and maybe — I dunno, raise a family? And write books? And teach, and do the narrative research that I love to do, and play the piano, and have friends (and students!) over for tea and dinner, and see the world, and draw, and… basically do things without having to set up communication logistics for everything in advance, and without being very, very tired from lipreading all the time?
This sounds like such a plaintive, childish thing to ask. But that’s all I’ve got and that’s how I feel — like I want to move within the world, connect with it — and unlike my usual, highly-competent, highly-independent adult self, this is something I can’t do on my own. I rely on other people for accessibility; I rely on hearing colleagues making their dialogues accessible to me, on interpreters translating what they say, on conferences to bring in the services I need to be there and not be exhausted. My own earnestness will not be enough. I need to actually ask the rest of the world for something I cannot pay back.
I don’t think these thoughts are yet entirely formed, and they don’t make sense to me yet, and that’s okay. I’ve mulled around this long enough to put this work-in-progress out there.
