Within just a few days of Dylann Roof’s racially motivated murder of 9 African-American worshippers and clergy in Charleston’s historic Emanuel A.M.E. Church, a sea change appeared to be under way with regards to the Confederate flag — this after decades of tense and slow-moving debate about whether the symbol ... More »

modempunk:

glitchartistscollective:

George Glitch

It looks like there are about two dozen of them.

Shit

This weekend, as the elated masses took to the streets to celebrate Friday’s historical win for inclusiveness and equality, the hate groups of the world took it upon themselves to balance out all that joy. Or, in the case of the Orthodox Jews of the Jewish Political Action Committee, they took it upon the Mexican laborers they hired to dress up as Jews and do the protesting for them.

Read more...

xgespentsx:

Atheris hispida is a venomous viper species endemic to Central Africa. It is known for its extremely keeled dorsal scales that give it a bristly appearance.

crossconnectmag:

Dazzling Images of the Brain Created by Neuroscientist-Artist 

Greg Dunne

I enjoy Asian art. I particularly love minimalist scroll and screen painting from the Edo period in Japan. I am also a fan of neuroscience. Therefore, it was a fine day when two of my passions came together upon the realization that the elegant forms of neurons (the cells that comprise your brain) can be painted expressively in the Asian sumi-e style. Neurons may be tiny in scale, but they posess the same beauty seen in traditional forms of the medium (trees, flowers, and animals). 

( Thanks Livescience )

                                                        &&

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reapersun:

reminder series: bleak yet comforting thoughts.

i specifically chose animals that are (or believed to be) extinct due to human influence: thylacine, great auk, baiji, west african black rhino, golden toad, dodo, passenger pigeon, and quagga. there are many other species i could have included. the plants are also based on extinct species, but i found much less information about extinct plants, unfortunately.

the text doesn’t necessarily relate to each animal or their extinction. it’s all basically the same idea: let’s all be nice to each other, because today, the universe is vast and incomprehensible, we are all suffering, we are all going to die, and we’re all in this together. for today.

i’m busy for a couple weeks with conventions, but after that i’m considering a companion series with ancient extinct animals, so feel free to send me your favorites :)

glukkake:

asylum-art:

DarkAngelØne

“Native American digital artist, DarkAngelØne, collaborates with photographers to create fantastic gif artwork that transforms original still pictures into moving masterpieces. ”

What’s interesting to note is that the artist claims not to be an artist. Instead, DarkAngelØne writes in his About page that he sees himself “as someone who just likes to play with pictures”. A humble attitude for someone who comes up with the stuff you can see below.

I like the inspirational aspect in this. It opens a window to look out into what modern technology is only just starting to allow us to do with it creatively.

how i wish i could see at all times

Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective:

There are various objections to expanding the conventional, up-tight, as-God-intended "one man, one woman" notion of marriage but by far the least plainly bigoted ones I am aware of are the bureaucratic ones.

To be blunt, the systems aren't set up to handle it. The paper forms have a space for the husband's name and a space for the wife's name. Married people carefully enter their details in block capitals and post the forms off to depressed paper-pushers who then type that information into software front-ends whose forms are laid out and named in precisely the same fashion. And then they hit "submit" and the information is filed away electronically in databases which simply keel over or belch integrity errors when presented with something so profound as a man and another man who love each other enough to want to file joint tax returns.

[...] Believe it or not, this is actually a fractionally less stupid database schema.

• males
  • id
  • forename
  • surname
  • birthdate
  • wife_id (unique foreign key references column females.id, may be NULL if male is unmarried)
• females
  • id
  • forename
  • surname
  • birthdate

This reduces the scope for ambiguity but it has suddenly become eye-poppingly sexist. Plus, what if you want to store information pertaining to the marriage itself? Like, the date it began?

Keep reading as he explains why you can't marry yourself, expands his database schema to cover polygamy, and eventually intransitive marriages:

The legal ramifications of what I'm about to describe are unguessable. I have no idea what rights a civil union like the ones which would be possible below would have, nor do I have any idea what kind of transhuman universe would require so complex a system. This is the marriage database schema to take us up to the thirty-first century, people.

Previously.

‘Kitsune V (Mae)’, 2013. Ink, acrylic on paper by Sail in beautiful.bizarre Issue 009

Buy beautiful.bizarre art book ~
Stockists [Print]: www.beautifulbizarre.net/stockists
Webstore [Print / e-Book]: www.beautifulbizarre.net/shop

Sail’s website: http://www.uselessarm.com/

Too soon?

vintagegal:

Blade Runner (1982) dir. Ridley Scott

The University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service has assembled a map that shows just how segregated out cities can be. The results can be used to help understand how racial problems affect communities and authorities.

Read more...

afternoonsnoozebutton:

The Onion’s coverage on gay marriage has been on fire (x).

chimericalcynosure:

By Badinspiration

mysharona1987:

I envy the satirical skills of Luke Massie Smith.

Fou Addiction

Picture this: you’re running through a maze, unsure of where the exit is. There’s a madman with a machete chasing you. Your heart starts racing...and the more you freak, the more the rooms around you seem to twist and turn.

Read more...

derangedraccoon:

realraccoon:

reasons i can relate to a raccoon:

• dark circles around eyes
• small & chubby
• lives in the trash and eats garbage
• cute but will fight you
• stays up all night
• washes hands a lot
• communicates solely through weird noises and screams

Worth another reblog.

Perfect, really.

Toothpaste for dinner

Rosario Dawson in 'Kids' (1995). Photo courtesy of Vidmark Entertainment/Photofest

Twenty years on and the teens that populate Harmony Korine's Kids still seem as nihilistic, violent, troubling, funny, and astonishingly clever as ever. Shot in a cinema-vérité style, Korine's movie follows a group of friends over the course of one day as they wander Manhattan boozing, smoking, and skating. The teens spend much of the film traveling in a pack, forever in search of the next great party, or at least the next great hangout.

In one of Kids's most iconic shots, they walk casually down the median of a busy street, drinking malt liquor in brown paper bags. Written by Harmony Korine and directed by Larry Clark, the film launched Rosario Dawson, Chloë Sevigny, and Leo Fitzpatrick to indie fame. Dawson was cast at 15. Fitzpatrick was discovered skating in Washington Square Park. And Korine was 19 years old when he wrote the script, and spent most of his appearance on Letterman, meant to promote Kids, talking more about his own wild antics than the film itself.

Fitzpatrick plays the film's arguable villain, Telly, a late teen hell-bent on virginal conquests ("Virgins, I love 'em," he says in a voiceover. "No diseases. No loosey-goose pussy. No skank. No nothin'. Just pure pleasure.") In Kids' opening scene, Telly and a girl who looks barely 13 sloppily make out in the girl's bedroom, before Telly says, "I like you. I think you're beautiful, and I think if we fuck, you would love it. You wouldn't believe it." It's a line he'll repeat almost verbatim later that night to another virgin, also barely a teenager. Neither girl loves it. The previous summer, Telly slept with Jennie (Sevigny), also a virgin, unwittingly giving her HIV. After getting the results of an STD test, Jennie spends the movie searching for Telly to confront him and warn his next conquest.

Encapsulating the teens' extremely different philosophies toward sex is a scene that intercuts conversations between the boys and the girls about what each respectively expects and enjoys. Before Jennie and Ruby (Dawson) go to the clinic to get their test results, they sit around a cramped bedroom with their friends, most chain smoking, sharing tales of their sexual experiences. And it's Dawson's character Ruby that's the brightest flame. Even among her friends, Ruby has a little swagger; she teases. When Jennie laments that she won't ever speak to Telly after what he did (sleeping with her and never acknowledging her again), Ruby announces to the room, "He stole her virginity. He took it away, and now it's gone. Forever!" It's Ruby who wants to get tested at the clinic in the first place, having had sex with eight or nine men (she can't remember), several of those instances unprotected. It's Ruby who, as a clinic nurse asks her questions ("Have you ever had anal intercourse? With how many partners?"), shifts in her seat, distracted by the anatomy posters in the room.

I spoke over the phone to actress Rosario Dawson about getting cast in Kids, watching her peers normalize sex at such a profoundly young age, and the film's legacy now, 20 years later.

VICE: How old were you when you were cast in Kids? How was this even pitched to you?
Rosario Dawson: I had just turned 15, and I was hanging out on my stoop. My dad had actually told me to go downstairs and get discovered because they were shooting a commercial on the block and they were looking for people to dance. And me, I'm not dancing, I kind of just hovered around for the weekend downstairs while they were shooting. That's when Larry (Clark), Harmony, and the VP, and a few other crew members spotted me. They were scouting for locations in the neighborhood.

I was talking to someone, and I guess I was so loud that the whole crew of people all turned and looked at me. I remembered in that moment that they had said they were recording sound that day. I was like, "Aw, man, I'm going to get in trouble. They're going to tell me to be quiet." Instead they all said, "Oh my god! I'm making this movie, we're trying to scout locations right now, you're perfect"—literally jumping up and down going—"We wrote this role for you, you're perfect for this role. I haven't even seen you or know you, but you're perfect for this role, I wrote it for you." And [Harmony] kind of just told me all about it. I leaned over and was like, "Daaad, people are talking to me about quote-on-quote making a movie." I was in shorts and a T-shirt like, Why are you talking to me?

'Kids' (1995). Photo courtesy of Miramax/Photofest

I went over to their office with my dad and auditioned. They had given me the script to read and my family was OK with it, excepting the fact that my character would be smoking. Otherwise, it resonated with them and they thought it worked and it was really well-written. I grew up among a lot of artists, so we appreciated the opportunity and what it meant. We didn't think much of it, considering they were picking people off the street, but we still thought it was a really good script and a really interesting world and very honest. I wasn't even remotely like that girl, but I knew that girl, I grew up with that girl. My mom was a teenage mom, so I knew so much about the vulnerabilities of this girl and the situation she's putting herself into.

I grew up around a bunch of girls, who at 13 or 14 were having sex with their boyfriends, who were usually drug dealers, and they were usually not using condoms, because the boyfriend preferred to do it "raw dog" because it felt better.

When Ruby and Jennie and their friends are just sitting around smoking and talking, there is so much posturing. The girls are so young and naïve, and yet they claim to have all this knowledge about being able to differentiate between what constitutes "sex" and "making love" and "fucking." What kinds of conversations were you really having with your female friends in real life about what sex really even was like?
I didn't even have sex until I was 20, so for me it was very far away from most of the reality of what I was talking about. I grew up around a bunch of girls, who at 13 or 14 were having sex with their boyfriends, who were usually drug dealers, and they were usually not using condoms, because the boyfriend preferred to do it "raw dog" because it felt better. I was just looking at these girls, going, "You are literally setting yourself up for the same cycle of violence and poverty that you're growing up in and that you're saying you want to be away from." The reality was really interesting because these girls went from 13 to 14 and after that summer break all of a sudden those girls went from liking TV shows and stickers to suddenly only wanting to talk about the sex that they were having. It wasn't that they had wanted to do these things, per se; it was sort of a by-product of the fact that they just developed too quickly, and I was a slow bloomer kind-of-thing. These girls suddenly had breasts and full tits. When they were walking down the street, even though they were young teenage girls, everyone treated them like they were women, and they were trying to acclimate to that. They were trying to normalize what was happening around them and the fact that grown men were giving them attention.

That's when I felt like Kids was worth doing. There were just all these girls around me normalizing the environment that they were in and posturing because of it. They were trying to be cool with what was around them and it was not necessarily resonating with them because they were co-opting what the other teens around them were doing. These were all kids coming from parents who worked really hard and weren't able to pay attention. That's what kids will do with idle hands.

My grandmother was watching it, going, 'Rosario, you know, I wish you had warned be before I went in,' and I said, 'Sorry, if I offended you.' She responded, 'You didn't offend me. There's not anything that's in this that anyone who's being honest can't connect to. I just wish you would have told me before I told all my church friends to go.'

A conversation that the girls in Kids aren't having at all is about the line between what is consensual and what isn't. We can look at someone like Telly, who preys on these pubescent virgins, and we know these girls haven't though about consent.
Even the girls I knew at the time who were having sex, it was because they were really pressuring each other because they all wanted to stay in the crew. It was as if because your body changed you had to change with it. There was so much attention that was being given to them, and they had to strut, they had to be tough, they had to be cool. They were giving hand-jobs in homeroom and blowjobs and I would think, What are you getting out of that? You're just being completely used and manipulated. Do you even know these guys? Do you even like this person? Do you like the way that they treat you? You could ask these questions and they'd get like a deer in headlights, like they'd never even considered it.

---

Watch Harmony Korine's 'The Legend of Cambo':

---

When you first saw the film in its entirety, how surprised were you when you saw the conversations that the boys were having about their sexual experiences versus what the girls were talking about?
Regardless of the fact that it was scripted and that a lot of people were non-actors, it just felt so raw. It was seamless between anything that was improv and anything that was scripted, because we were all just non-actors.

But I think both the girls and boys have aspects of posturing by a lot, and kind of being pushed. You've got kids teaching kids. They think they're never going to die, they're always going to stay young forever, they fight and they bounce back up after each scar. That's how fallible they are. Both were just really misleading in the fact that they sounded like they had a lot of experience or they sounded like they knew what they were talking about, and they really didn't.

Chloë Sevigny in 'Kids' (1995). Photo courtesy of Miramax/Photofest

In that particular scene, my character kind of drives the energy. Larry (Clark) would keep reminding me to be more forceful, be more aggressive. I was just so mesmerized by the process. Chloë was just playing this really interesting guy-ish kind of girl. She was way more advanced, she was older than I was, and she was this really cool it-girl street kid in comparison to myself. Even though I grew up on the Lower East Side, I was very sheltered. I just remember trying to talk to her about my different experiences and she just kind of looked at me and realized how opposite I was playing to myself. Most of the kids were really playing to themselves, and I think that's what Larry caught. Harmony, being 19 years old when he wrote it, made the language and everything feel so familiar, like a documentary. My grandmother was watching it, going, "Rosario, you know, I wish you had warned be before I went in," and I said, "Sorry, if I offended you." She responded, "You didn't offend me. I had to have children for a reason. There's not anything that's in this that anyone who's being honest can't connect to. I just wish you would have told me before I told all my church friends to go."

On i-D: Where Are Larry Clark's 'Kids' Now?

I think that's what makes the film still hold up today, regardless of how outdated it is. We used a payphone at one point. There were no cell phones in the movie. The premise doesn't even work today, considering how connected everybody is. Everybody's got a geo-locator on them. The whole idea of having to spend the entire day to look for someone doesn't even really work feasibly.

But there's a real connection to that moment in time, when you're trying to explore and figure out that next phase of life. You don't necessarily have the best mentors around you. You've got kids teaching kids. It's a moment in your life when you think you're never going to die, you're always going to stay young forever, you fought and you bounced back up after each scar, but that's actually not the reality—you can get pregnant, you can die, you can get a disease. That's how fallible and vulnerable we really are. I'm sharing that with my kids now. They can [bring up the sex conversation] whenever they want to. There's still just a lot of ignorance, silliness, provocation, curiosity, and adventure. It's just a lot of hormones.

BAM will be hosting a screening of Kids followed by a Q+A with director Larry Clark, co-writer Harmony Korine, actors Rosario Dawson, Chloë Sevigny, and Leo Fitzpatrick on Thursday, June 25, at 7 PM, and an additional screening at 8 PM, without special guests.

Follow Rebecca on Twitter.

Alejandro García Restrepo (Medellín, Colombia) - Illustration for a short story by Jaime Jaramillo Panesso, 2013 Drawings: Pencils on Paper


Alejandro García Restrepo (Medellín, Colombia) - Illustration for a short story by Jaime Jaramillo Panesso, 2013 Drawings: Pencils on Paper


Alejandro García Restrepo (Medellín, Colombia) - Illustration for a short story by Jaime Jaramillo Panesso, 2013 Drawings: Pencils on Paper


Alejandro García Restrepo (Medellín, Colombia) - Illustration for a short story by Jaime Jaramillo Panesso, 2013 Drawings: Pencils on Paper


Alejandro García Restrepo (Medellín, Colombia) - Illustration for a short story by Jaime Jaramillo Panesso, 2013 Drawings: Pencils on Paper

redlipstickresurrected:

Alejandro García Restrepo (Medellín, Colombia) - Illustration for a short story by Jaime Jaramillo Panesso, 2013   Drawings: Pencils on Paper

Let me go

Children’s Nuclear Warning Poster (1979)

A research team from the University of York has figured out the last key step in how poppies produce opium.

The post Why Harvest Opiates When You Can Get Yeast to Produce Them? appeared first on WIRED.

Facial recognition software no longer needs to see your faceFacial recognition software no longer needs to see your face in order to recognize you, a development that has understandably spurred all sorts of anxiety among the privacy-conscious. Facebook's artificial intelligence chief says we won't see the company’s new technology used until people are ready to accept our new back-of-your-head recognition reality—should we believe him?

"It's a scientific experiment to see how well we can do in this respect," Yann LeCun, Facebook's director of artificial intelligence, said at a French technology conference in New York City Wednesday. "This is not some dark basement somewhere where we are hiding what we're working on, we publish everything we do with the broader research community—we are trying to push science forward."

LeCun said that a series of advances have made it possible to snag a person's face in one photo, and then to recognize them later. "We can identify them by which clothes they're wearing and the body type they have, even if we don't see their faces," he said.

In a keynote conversation with Yahoo's Alyssa Bereznak, LeCun said that it's obviously useful for AI to recognize people without actually seeing their faces, but that the company isn't ready to upset its users by implementing it into any of Facebook's platforms.

"Face recognition products are deployed in most countries, but not in countries where people are uncomfortable with it," he said. "We don't want to upset people, so we don't have facial recognition in Europe where people are uncomfortable with it."

That may be the case, but in the United States, Facebook has turned its repository of, well, faces into something that its users may find creepy but nonetheless convenient. After years of asking users to click on faces and "tag" their friends, Facebook started more-or-less automating the process. It now has one of the most widely used facial recognition programs in the world, and few people think twice about the fact that Facebook knows exactly what you look like.

Last week, Facebook launched "Moments," a new photo-sharing app that relies entirely on facial recognition. Basically, it allows you to send batches of your private photos to the people who are in the photos with a Tinder-like swipe. If you go to a music festival, for instance, you can get all the pictures from that event without your friend having to actually put them on Facebook.

While the American public responded to Moments with a "meh," privacy groups and Europe were highly concerned about the potential for privacy abuse—so much so that the product is not going to be released in the EU.

"We're not developing products directly, but we work to help get a spectrum of different products out the door," LeCun said. "We work on things that have an application within a few years, image recognition, face recognition."

As Facebook has more or less let facial recognition's role increase in all of its American products, it seems unlikely that LeCun's new tech is going to sit on the shelf forever. The utility of Moments, for instance, increases substantially if it's able to tell who you happened to be hanging out with that day.

If Facebook can call upon information it already has stored about you—you're wearing that red checkered shirt AGAIN?—then Moments can "seamlessly" help you share photos. Is there any doubt that, creepy or not, we're going to eventually see this tech in Facebook's products?