On Monday of this week, it was announced that Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone of Somerville filed a civil lawsuit against the blog Barstool Sports as well as their associate Kirk Minihane.
Curtatone alleges that Minihane impersonated Boston Globe reporter Kevin Cullen and illegally recorded the phone interview for illicit purposes.
In a public statement shared on his Facebook account, the mayor said:
“I have filed a civil lawsuit in Middlesex Superior Court in Woburn against Kirk Minihane and Barstool Sports. It’s a straightforward complaint. Minihane recorded himself breaking the law, impersonating a Boston Globe reporter to obtain an interview with me, then Barstool posted the interview on its website. It’s a clear violation of Massachusetts General Law, which forbids audio recording a person without his/her consent, and you can’t obtain that consent through fraudulent means. Barstool flaunts its lack of respect for most things, but it needs to respect the laws that govern the business it conducts.”
Curtatone further indicated that any damages awarded from the suit would be donated to the RESPOND women’s shelter in Somerville.
Representatives of Barstool Sports have openly disputed the allegations, and a social media war of words has erupted between the concerned parties.
Barstool Sports is a sports and pop culture blog founded by Dave Portnoy in Milton, Massachusetts. The site, which has been owned since 2016 by The Chernin Group, a media holding company, is currently headquartered at 333 7th Avenue, New York City.
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“I’m in shock. I think many of us in my industry are in shock,” said James R. Wacht, board member of Real Estate Board of New York. “It’s a lot worse than we anticipated” This article on the new tenant protections is a bracing cocktail of landlord tears
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Parallaxian, a stunning new shoot’em up / bomb’em up game in development for the Commodore 64 is set to push the old home computer beyond it’s limits, raising the bar with graphical and coding techniques never...
As the sick elephant saga was winding down, I thought to myself, “Surely I can’t just drop back into gag-comics-as-usual. It would feel too abrupt!”
So I decided I would write another series, one that wouldn’t feel like a series but that could still work on multiple levels.
All the comics since the elephant saga have ended have been part of this series, starting back with #1437 in November and continuing through today’s #1448.
I wasn’t sure if anyone would notice, or let me know if they did. So I mentioned on Twitter that the recent comics were all linked in some way, and asked if anyone had figured out how.
Anna had:
Dusted off a literally years-old Twitter account to reply to this, because nothing baits an internet pedant better than getting to be first to the punch: They’re all remakes of the first Wondermarks, or at the very least feature lines/characters from them!
More specifically, they’re fifteen-years-later looks on the characters. (Dean-O killed his wife’s mother fifteen years ago, Chorncey’s been dry a decade and a half, the Scotsman’s piano “must be near twenty years old”, Jesson’s pal was eating maps years before the first iPhone.)
If you want to see what Anna’s talking about, start with comic #001 in one tab and comic #1437 in another — then read forward in both timelines, and check out where the journey leads you.
"Hello! Black Room is a game about your internet browser."
This one has been out for about a year, but I only heard of it recently when it was recommended by author and musician Liz Ryerson.
Black Room presents itself in three distinct ways: as a personal narrative about falling asleep, as a meditation on the web browser, and as a 'feminist dungeon crawler'. These three themes do overlap, and at the center of the Venn diagram is a subtle and opaque experience that is more ambitious and larger than any other browser game I can remember playing.
The narrative conceit that opens the game is the idea that the titular 'black room' is a meditative technique, passed to the author by her mother: imagine a room and fill it with furniture until you fall asleep. The objects in the room begin as furniture but it soons become clear they are framed more broadly as thoughts or symbols, and as you progress through the game the room becomes more fragmented, cluttered and dreamlike, perhaps as the narrator falls into an unsettled, anxious sleep. The recurring visual theme is the image of women from fiction – particularly, from the digital forms of ascii art, GIFs, and videogame pixel art characters – suggesting that in our connected digital lives we are trapped in a waking semiotic fever-dream, where cultural symbols are permanently burned into our retinas to be paraded endlessly behind our eyelids while we sleep.
The author also presents Black Room as a 'game about your internet browser', an idea which is not only explored through the recycled digital ephemera that populates it, but in formal ways through the browser itself. It (explicitly) asks you to resize your browser window to change your view; it pops open new windows with new modes of interaction, and splits your attention and sense of embodiment in the space, building that particular sense of anxiety that is common both to troubled dreams and to browsers with too many tabs left open. Eventually you feel overwhelmed by the threads of too many ideas and too many tasks, your desktop littered with open windows, your computer's fan running at full speed.
There's a good writeup of Black Room on Hyperallergic by Andrew Klein, but I haven't really seen anyone discussing the feminist themes in it, probably because to really talk about it in depth would spoil some of the surprise, and – after all – the whole point of this blog is to convince you to actually play the games I recommend rather than to predigest them for you. But I suppose it will not spoil anything to say that Black Room gradually warms up to a particular idea, which Judith Plaskow famously pioneered in 1972, and which has been explored in other influential feminist games. Black Room, I think, explores a dream that is not nostalgic but darkly utopian, like the work of the first surrealist painters.
By the way: there's a growing breeze of interesting utopian work being done in games right now, especially by younger designers. From Colestia's overtly political games about urban space, to subtly optimistic things like solimporta's Levedad, to specific personal utopias like One Night Hot Springs. In a medium that started with the nihilistic pessimism of Missile Command and Robotron — and stayed there for decades — that seems like some kind of turning point.
The year 1970 was an important year in the history of Nintendo. It had just completed new offices at its headquarter location in the Higashiyama district of Kyoto and received a listing at the premiere stock market in Osaka.
To mark this moment, and attract (wholesale) customers and investors, the company produced a company overview brochure (会社概況).
Nintendo Company Overview from 1970 (front)
The brochure has 16 pages inside. It was printed in full colour.
Full layout of the brochure (front, 16 pages content, back)
The first page contains a summary of the key information about the company. Read more... »
My current video game obsession is Player Unknown’s Battleground, also referred to as PUBG. It’s an online multiplayer game which drops yourself and 99 others into a single, large map and you battle it out until the last man is standing. It’s frustrating, heart-attack inducing, exciting…it’s PUBG.
One problem with the game can be that seeing red blood is difficult, especially if you’re sniping from hundreds of meters away; an alternative color, green for example, is much easier to see. Most games and even video cards provide options to adjust colors for those with visual impairments or simply are color blind.
To switch to green blood in PUBG, follow these steps:
Open Steam
Right-click on the game, select Properties
Click the “Set Launch Options” button
In the dialog, type: -KoreanRating
The next time you launch your game you will see green blood instead of red blood! Green blood is easier to see for all types of vision and if you’re sensitive to blood and prefer a more cartoony green feel, this well help as well.
It was difficult to miss 20-year-old student Tae, who was clad in a vintage blue men’s suit while on a day out in Harajuku.
She wore a vintage bright pink collared top from Groovy under a vintage blue jacket. Tae also wore vintage blue wide-leg pants and vintage black loafers. Blue lipstick, a vintage bag, and a striped belt completed her look.
September 7th, 2018: RIDDLE WEEK begins here! It'll be three comics about riddles, which kinda form a week if you squint sufficiently hard. HERE WE GO!!
Also, I'm at XOXO this weekend! If you're around too LET'S MEET UP AND EXCHANGE HIGH FIVES?
Kanji was hard to miss in an all-black ensemble that made him stand out on the streets of Harajuku.
The 17-year-old student wore a black crop top with the sleeves cut off and black Lad Musician wide-leg pants with a drawstring waist. Kanji styled them with a black Sulvam jacket, which hung loosely down his arms. He also wore Dolls Kill black velvet shoes and carried a black Lad Musician tote bag around his shoulder. Kanji also had a black scarf wrapped around his face to add a dramatic flourish to his outfit. A black fedora, sunglasses, and several chunky rings provided the finishing touches to his look. His accessories are from Dog Harajuku and Sonia Rykiel.
Kanji’s favorite fashion inspiration these days comes from Fecal Matter, and he listens to My First Story as far as music. Follow Kanji on Instagram and Twitter to keep up with his social media updates.
On Sept. 4, Middlesex County residents will face a choice: Who should be their next district attorney?The incumbent, Marian Ryan, is facing Winchester lawyer Dona Patalano in the Democratic primary race. There is no Republican registered to run for the seat, however write-in candidates will be allowed in the Nov. 8, 2018 general election.District attorneys determine the punishment in 9 of 10 criminal cases, closing them with plea bargains, according to the Massachusetts branch [...]
– This pasta: Been making a version of it on the regular, pictured below with added toasted cashews, broccolini, lemon zest. (recipe)
– The Un-celebrity President (Washington Post)
While out taking a stroll along the streets of Harajuku, we came across Hyaku and Tari, two teens whose striking streetwear ensembles easily caught our eye.
Sporting a fringed updo is Tari, whose ensemble features a beige Sokkyou chicken feed sack dress, worn over a beige t-shirt from Undercover and red Comme des Garcons printed pants. They completed their outfit with teal socks, white Birkenstock sandals and a canvas tote bag with red polka dot prints from 10 Graphic, Inc. Their accessories – from Undercover, Serge Thoraval and Cant – include colorblock eyeglasses, blue pom pom earrings, a bronze mesh belt, a gold watch, silver bracelets, and multiple knuckle rings.
Meanwhile, at the right is Hyaku, who is sporting a fringed bob with green twin braids. Hyaku is dressed in a sheer black sleeveless ruffle top from Simone Rocha, which she wore on top of a red printed t-shirt from Undercover. She styled her layered tops with a black bubble skirt from Bernhard Willhelm, donned yellow-and-black furry socks over fishnet tights, and slipped into black ruffle sneakers from Onitsuka Tiger. Hyaku’s accessories – from Chigo, Pala, and some vintage items – include round sunglasses, a black fringed neck wallet, silver bangles, multiple rings, and a black leather satchel bag with a silver chain strap from Mihara Yasuhiro.
