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While out walking on the streets of Harajuku, we met 18-year-old Kana, whose cool hairstyle and all-black fashion caught our eye.

Sporting long hair with blunt bangs, Kana is dressed in a black blazer, worn over a mock-neck sheer top and layered with an asymmetrical ombre pleated dress, all of which are from popular Japanese streetwear designer, Yohji Yamamoto. A pair of suede platform booties, and a bold pop of red lipstick rounded out Kana’s minimalist street style.

Yohji Yamamoto is Kana’s favorite fashion label, and she likes the music of Japanese rock band, [Alexandros]. For more on Kana, follow her on Instagram.

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While taking a stroll through the streets of Tokyo’s famous Harajuku neighborhood, we were lucky to run into Tsumire, the jewelry designer of The Ivy Tokyo and her adorable 3-year-old Ivy. We have been street snapping Tsumire for many years and it’s always a pleasure to see her and her wonderful daughter.

Sporting a two-tone hairstyle, Tsumire is dressed in a black patent leather belted jumper dress from Growing Pains, which she wore over a dark green paisley print button down shirt. She sported a pair of blue colorblock sneakers from Reebok and a printed drawstring bag from Gucci. Her accessories include a nurse cap from Growing Pains, colorful hair clips, floral drop earrings from The Ivy Tokyo, a Dolce & Gabbana gold watch, and a silver armor ring from Vivienne Westwood. Tsumire’s favorite fashion labels are Growing Pains and Vivienne Westwood, and she likes listening to the music of BES. Tsumire is active on Instagram.

Cute little Ivy is wearing a green velvet Chinese-style dress, yellow tights, and yellow loafer shoes. She is sporting twin buns with blunt bangs, pink bows on her hair, pretty flower earrings from The Ivy Tokyo, and a black crossbody bag from Vivienne Westwood. For more on her cute fashion styles, follow Ivy on Instagram.

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Ben Latimore writes about his quest to save Flash games before they disappear. ...

Gamers Rejoice: Steam Is Having A Sale This Week On 50 Pounds Of Hot Salad For Only $5 »

"Smartphone Games are the Ones I Want to Expand the Most"

Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention »

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checking in on the Akron Ohio Rolling Acres Mall WAD progress, it's looking nice »

Zora Neale Hurston is one of the greatest literary and anthropologist treasures in American history, despite her dying completely forgotten and in poverty in 1960. Her 1931 novel Barracoon is finally being published for the first time. It’s based on her own oral histories with the last survivor off the last slave ship to enter the United States, in 1860. This is amazing.

Barracoon is testament to her patient fieldwork. The book is based on three months of periodic interviews with a man named Cudjo Lewis — or Kossula, his original name — the last survivor of the last slave ship to land on American shores. Plying him with peaches and Virginia hams, watermelon and Bee Brand insect powder, Hurston drew out his story. Kossula had been captured at age 19 in an area now known as the country Benin by warriors from the neighboring Dahomian tribe, then marched to a stockade, or barracoon, on the West African coast. There, he and some 120 others were purchased and herded onto the Clotilda, captained by William Foster and commissioned by three Alabama brothers to make the 1860 voyage.

When Hurston tried to get Barracoon published in 1931, she couldn’t find a taker. There was concern among “black intellectuals and political leaders” that the book laid uncomfortably bare Africans’ involvement in the slave trade, according to novelist Alice Walker’s foreword to the book, which is finally being published in May. Walker is responsible for reintroducing the world to a forgotten Zora Neale Hurston, who’d died penniless and alone in 1960, in a 1975 Ms. magazine essay. As Walker writes, “Who would want to know, via a blow-by-blow account, how African chiefs deliberately set out to capture Africans from neighboring tribes, to provoke wars of conquest in order to capture for the slave trade. This is, make no mistake, a harrowing read.”

One publisher, Viking Press, did say it would be happy to accept the book, on the condition that Hurston rewrote it “in language rather than dialect.” She refused. Boas had impressed upon her the importance of meticulous transcription, and while her contemporaries — and authors of 19th-century slave narratives — believed “you had to strip away all the vernacular to prove black humanity,” says Salamishah Tillet, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Hurston was of the exact opposite opinion.

So it never got published and then was completely forgotten about until now.

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Dragalia Lost is a joint development venture for Nintendo and Cygames.

NU Café, a juice bar and café with locations in Worcester and Somerville, will relaunch on May 1 as NU Kitchen.“It’s become less and less about a place to get your morning coffee or a healthy lunch and more about the curation of a lifestyle,” said owner Josh Van Dyke. “We found our customers wanting to learn more about our ingredients and methodology and also wanting to push our hours later and later and have Nu Kitchen become an extension of not [...]

We caught up with Megumi, who stepped out in an oversized suit for a day at Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo.

The 18-year-old fashion student wore a blue striped button-down shirt from Polo Ralph Lauren under a grey oversized jacket from the Tokyo vintage shop Faith Tokyo. Megumi also wore loose grey Faith Tokyo pants, which she styled with a black belt, a Harley Davidson key, and a Faith Tokyo chain. She finished off her look with Fila white lace-up sneakers, a curly blonde bob with bangs, and a bold red lip.

Megumi enjoys shopping at Cannabis and listening to hip hop music. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter to keep up with her social media updates.

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25 years ago today the first major web browser was released: Mosaic 1.0. #otd #todayintech https://t… »

Two months ago, LGM commenters routinely talked about my demand for federally guaranteed employment as a pie-in-the-sky impossibility. Today, it’s becoming a position that any Democratic candidate must adopt to compete in the primaries.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) has a big idea: give 15 local areas federal money so they can guarantee all their residents a job.

The Federal Jobs Guarantee Development Act, announced by Booker on Friday, would establish a three-year pilot program in which the Department of Labor would select up to 15 local areas (defined in the bill as any political subdivision of a state, like a city or a county, or a group of cities and counties) and offer that area funding so that every adult living there is guaranteed a job paying at least $15 an hour (or the prevailing wage for the job in question, whichever’s higher) and offering paid family/sick leave and health benefits.

The idea of a government job guarantee ensuring all adults who want employment get it has a long history in American politics, but it has gained popularity as the Democratic Party has sought to embrace bigger and more ambitious economic policies in the wake of the 2016 election.

Booker’s plan is essentially a pilot version of a proposal from Duke’s Mark Paul and William Darity, Jr. and the New School’s Darrick Hamilton, economists who have, together and individually, advocated a job guarantee for years, well before the current surge in enthusiasm. Most recently, Paul, Darity, and Hamilton wrote up their proposal for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a highly influential left-of-center think tank, in a clear sign the idea was gaining traction. Booker’s bill is an even bigger step forward.

“The federal jobs guarantee is an idea that demands to be taken seriously,” Booker said in a statement. “Creating an employment guarantee would give all Americans a shot at a day’s work and, by introducing competition into the labor market, raise wages and improve benefits for all workers.”

This follows up on Kirsten Gillibrand announcing her support for a federal job guarantee a couple of weeks ago. Bernie Sanders will be on this soon and I expect Warren will as well. I like the pilot project aspect of Booker’s plan and think it’s the kind of experimentation we need to see.

As I have stated repeatedly, while cash transfers to people is a policy to support, Universal Basic Income as a solution to job issues is not going to work as a policy and it is an absurdity in terms of meeting working people’s values. I am routinely amazed how quickly its supporters move to “We need to teach people to work less” as an argument in favor of it. Not only is this unrealistic, this is the precise type of social engineering telling working class people what to do that the left criticizes about neoliberals who tell people to move or get job retraining to deal with economic changes. What happened to asking workers what they want and honoring working class cultures? UBI as a solution is an intellectual exercise that very quickly requires workers to adopt not just the policies but the values of its progenitors. And good luck with that! Why not tell working class people not to eat potato chips or drink while we are at it! The solution to crappy jobs is to make work better and more dignified. Now, it’s not as if UBI and a job guarantee are completely incompatible. There are many ways to combine them in useful ways. When I have these conversations, I am again amazed at how often people say “Well, what about disabled people!?!” as if this is scoring some sort of point. Obviously, any society where we have a universal job guarantee is also going to have the robust safety net to create cash transfers for those who can’t work. But the point-scoring aspect of these conversations shows just how much this is an intellectual exercise confirming the beliefs about work by those who want to eliminate it to free the proletariat or something.

My point here is that a universal job guarantee is going to have much greater political appeal than UBI. It not only honors work cultures, it reinforces American values around work that defined the welfare state. Like it or not, these are real. As a leftist anti-utopian, I prefer to develop policies that work within the context of the lived experiences of people, not engage in thinking about alternative universes, long a black hole for leftist thinkers. This may also be why I hate science fiction and fantasy literature; nothing could be more interesting than the world in which we live. Anyway, the political appeal of a federal job guarantee is very real and that’s why everyone who wants the Democratic nomination is going to support some form of it by 2020.

Now, if you had told me in 2016 that this would become embraced by even someone with a questionable past on workers’ issues such as Booker, I would have said you were off your rocker. We are in April 2018. What are the policies Democratic candidates are going to have to commit to by January 2020 to separate themselves from each other and win the nomination? It’s going to be an interesting thing to watch. The party isn’t shifting left. It’s sprinting left. And it goes to show what the left taking over the Democratic Party can do, as opposed to engaging in worthless and counterproductive third party campaigns, not to mention people wasting their time on arid voting reforms based on abstract notions of democracy instead of just turning the institutions we already have into advocates for justice.

And if Booker comes out in opposition to ketchup, we will know he is an LGM reader.

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Greatness from small beginnings.

Who are you, and what do you do?

I am cinchel. I make music, sound art, paintings, videos and some photography. I started learning guitar at the age of 15 and have continued to use it as my main instrument to generate sounds. Almost all of my work focuses on abstracting the sounds of real instruments while still conveying the emotional idea of the performance.

I use Bandcamp to post my final works. Most of my visual works, painting and photography, are made as packaging for many of these releases. I keep a running log of works in progress, live sets and other sketches and ideas at http://demos.cinchel.com/. Videos can be found on Vimeo and YouTube. Of course I tweet @cinchel, Instagram and occasionally Tumblr.

I am also a parent to 3 cats (Jarvis Cocker, Broadcast and PJ Harvey) - they are cats #4, #5 & #6. RIP #1 Spooky, #2 Buckley and #3 Dr. Pirate. Being a cat parent and a musician, I created this Flickr group called "Cats on amps" in April of 2010 because they seemed to love to sit on them all the time. Sometime around 2014(?) I moved it to this tumblr. I unfortunately dropped the ball and forgot to grab the Instagram handle, oh well.

What hardware do you use?

My favorite guitar is my '65 Fender Jazzmaster. I also have a 2003 Gibson SG and I recently picked up a 2013 Fender Bass VI. Non-guitar instruments include a 1972 Fender Rhodes, an Arturia MicroBrute and a Critter and Guitari Pocket Piano. My main gig amp is a Sunn Beta Lead 2x12. I also have a late-80's Fender Champ 12, an early 70's Silverface Fender Champ, and a Sunn Beta Bass and 1x15 Emperor cabinet. My favorite tape delay is the Fulltone Tube Tape Echo but I also have a Roland Space Echo RE-201 that I'll use occasionally.

I still have my first 4-track tape recorder, a Tascam Portastudio 414. My wife and I married in May of 1999 and that following summer I worked on avg 60hrs a week as a security guard at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. At the end of that summer I treated myself to finally buying this 4-track so that I could try out all the musical ideas I had that only existed in my head. While I have more sophisticated tools to record with now, I will still often bounce mixes down to this 4-track while messing with the pitch control dial for that extra warped tape goodness.

The current guitar pedal chain goes like this: guitar - boss tuner - Mu-Tron Volume-Wah - Trex Replica - Mr Black TunnelWorm - Earthquaker The Depths - ProCo RAT - Boss Tremolo - MXR Analog Delay ('72) - DOD DFX9 digital delay - Danelectro Chorus - TC Electronics DITTO LOOPER - Strymon TimeLine - Digitech Whammy. The end of the signal chain is split and goes to the guitar amps and into the laptop. That DOD DFX9 was the first pedal I ever bought, at a pawn shop with my friend in high school in 1994. I really wanted to sound like The Edge on "Joshua Tree" so I knew I would need to start messing with delay pedals.

When I record guitar direct into the laptop (MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015)) I'll run it through a Model feT which boosts the signal and adds some punch. If I'm recording the amps I'll usually use Oktava MK-319 mics, plugged into a Black Lion Audio Auteur MKII pre-amp. My digital audio interface is a Focusrite Scarlett 6i6 (which I recently had mod'ed by Black Lion Audio). I'll usually monitor with Grado SR325 headphones and mix/master using Adam A5X powered monitors.

I have an Edirol R-05 digital recorder that I use to record live shows or capture field recordings while I'm out, although I often forget to bring it with me and so I'll just use my iPhone 6s.

I never know what might turn into something I want to keep so I record a lot and save almost everything. I'm also an obsessive music purchaser/listener, which required me to finally setup a NAS. A Synology DS1517+ w/ DX517 expansion with all 10 bays full of 4TB drives at RAID6 should keep us happy for a while. My wife is a photographer, so between the two of us we have A LOT of data to keep safe.

I mostly photograph with a Mamiya C330 medium format film camera with the 80mm or 60mm lens. I borrow my wife's Canon 5D MKIV to shoot video using a 50mm f1.8 or 24-70mm f2.4 lens. I paint using watercolors.

Mix notes, song name ideas, installation sketches and general doodles are captured in Field Notes Graph Paper notebooks.

And what software?

My main recording DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) is Ableton Live 8, though I will occasionally use Audacity for some editing and generating 16/44.1 320MP3 from 24/96 AIFF files. I use the computer not only to capture sound but also to manipulate it. Outside of the plugins that come with Live (like beat repeat, delay, autofilter, all of which I enjoy using in ways that I am sure was not intended by the creators), I have a small collection of other VST's. I really enjoy the Freq Echo and Shimmer from Valhalla. All of the Freeware and non-free VST from Soundhack are pretty wild, as are the Soundmagic Spectral audio units from Michael Norris. When I don't have Andrew Weathers or Joe Panzner master my recordings I use IZotope Ozone 5 suite.

What would be your dream setup?

Infinite time and space. Like, I want to live forever and be able to go/be anywhere. I think 10 or even 5 years ago I would have probably just listed things. While I do like things and could use things (like a larger monitor, or just 2 reasonable sized monitors and a decent sized desk to put them on) things are not stopping me from creating or challenging myself and my ideas.

It's a well-written and cheeky example of a game design doc, as well as perhaps the only example of a public design doc for a comedy RPG set in a Wild West populated entirely by stick figures. ...

Once again, we crossed paths with Shiho Tabei, an artist we often feature on our Harajuku street snaps. Today, we caught her on the busy street sporting eye-catching pink hair and a metallic silver-and-black outfit.

Shiho – sporting a pink bob with long back hairstyle – donned a silver quilted jacket from Otoe with contrast black collar and cuffs, and wore a black button down blouse with front ruffles and a silver maxi jumper skirt from Comme des Garcons. She followed up with white socks, black platform bow shoes from Tokyo Bopper, and a black round handbag with floral applique, also from Tokyo Bopper. To cap off her look, Shiho wore a black standalone statement ruffle collar from Comme des Garcons. Round eyeglasses, red eye makeup and pink lips are the finishing touches to her style.

Shiho’s fashion favorites are Japanese streetwear brand, Comme des Garcons and Otoe. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

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There will be over 20 in the game.

Here’s Kanata (Instagram & Twitter), whose colorful kawaii street style has made him a well known personality around the streets of Harajuku. He works at the famous Harajuku boutique 6%DOKIDOKI.

Kanata was difficult to miss with his colorful hair falls and striking dinosaur coat. He also wore a 6%DOKIDOKI top, yellow printed shorts, and pink-and-blue printed leggings. Kanata styled his look with colorful socks and his favorite peep-toed platform wedge sandals with red, white, and blue stripes. Colorful makeup, multiple facial piercings, and a pink-and-yellow circular bag from Little Miss Matched completed his look.

A little girl was just as enamored with Kanata’s look as we are that she stopped by while he was getting photographed. She was also dressed stylishly for the cold weather in a black furry coat, a red skirt with white polka dots, and black leggings. Pink sneakers, a red-and-black hat, and a white furry scarf finished off her adorable look.

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Cecil Taylor + Pauline Oliveros: Solo. Duo. Poetry documents their performances at the centre's opening ten years ago

In memory of Cecil Taylor, the Curtis R Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is offering a free DVD of performances at the centre on 5 October 2008.

Solo. Duo. Poetry. features a collaboration between Taylor and Pauline Oliveros, who was a professor at the Polytechnic in New York. It documents the pair playing solo plus a 22 minute duo meditation marking the first time they performed together. Though their collaboration can be viewed online, Taylor's solo performance is on the DVD only.

Also included is Floating Gardens: The Poetry Of Cecil Taylor, a 75 minute video of a Taylor poetry recital (also available on Vimeo) presented at the same event.

The DVD is available for free through EMPAC – buyers just have to pay the cost of postage and packing.

Watch the Cecil Taylor and Pauline Oliveros duet below.

Cecil Taylor and Pauline Oliveros at EMPAC — Duet from EMPAC @ Rensselaer on Vimeo.

We stumbled upon Kiku, whose eclectic take on androgynous streetwear caught our eye in Harajuku.

The 16-year-old student donned a handmade denim vest with zipper trims and a cut-out detail. He wore it over a yellow ribbed knit sweater with ruffle detail and a Banana Republic striped button-down shirt. Kiku tucked them into Zara animal-printed cropped pants, which were cinched at the waist with a black leather belt. He styled them with a Gucci sling bag, red printed socks, and Dog Harajuku platform wedge sneakers with printed uppers, blue piping, and green and red laces.

Kiku’s favorite fashion label is Balmung, and he enjoys listening to music from Momoland. For more on Kiku, follow him on Instagram.

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It took 30 years for the three weavers of the Dragon Quest series to meet face-to-face-to-face.

Zutti and Sakurako are Japanese students – beauty and art school – who we often see around the streets of Harajuku. They are friends whose colorful vintage styles compliment each other.

Zutti – 19 years old, on the left – is wearing a vintage striped button up shirt from Kinji Harajuku with flared pants and super tall platform heels from F21. Some of Zutti’s accessories are by Versace. Follow Zutti on Instagram and Twitter for more of their fabulous fashion.

Sakurako – 18, with shaved blue hair on the right – is wearing a vintage belted jacket from Kinji Harajuku over a resale shirt, a colorblock resale mini skirt, blue tights, and vintage blue suede heels. She bought most of her accessories in Koenji and her bag is handmade. She also told us that her favorite shop is San To Nibun No Ichi. Follow Sakurako on Instagram and Twitter for more fun fashion and art.

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Further adventures from the Mildred files with brand new meditations on egg-hatching, test tubes, and ether troughs. Featuring appearances from Sarah and Tim.

– NEWEST UPDATE – MAIREN’S SITE – MAIREN’S INSTA –

– TO BE CONTINUED – MILDRED’S MOTEL MIX-UPS UPDATES EVERY MONDAY –

"Find out where the squirrel keeps their stash" - Author's description

Download on itch.io (Windows, Mac, Linux)

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Here’s Toranosuke, whose colorful printed ensemble caught our attention while strolling along the streets of Harajuku.

The 18-year-old student wore a maroon long-sleeved shirt under a Burberry plaid top styled with a checkered necktie and a bright red vintage hunting vest from Beegle’s Sporting Goods. Toranosuke styled them with vintage red-and-brown plaid pants and Dr. Martens black leather lace-up shoes. He completed his look with purple hair and chunky rings from Vivienne Westwood and Maison Margiela.

Toranosuke’s favorite fashion brands include Gucci and Vivienne Westwood, and he enjoys listening to music from Oasis. He is active on both Instagram and Twitter.

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