“…here and there among the conformist fat-cat crowds is a lean cat or two looking like it might swing, given some encouragement.”
The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized.
—(via The New Yorker)
Tennessee is trying to pass a bill that makes it legal to bully homosexuals if you are religiously or morally against homosexuality. Please sign this petition.
So this post makes it sound like you should support this. I’ll assume they didn’t intend that, a passionate mistype. It you do support it, you should be fucked in the eye socket by hyenas forever. Fight for equal rights. Always.
(Source: shamartha08, via ageofreason)
Why is Google FUBAR, then? Because it is biting the hand that feeds it. Indexed search might have peaked, but it’s still huge, and still propelled Google to over $10 billion in revenue this past quarter. To become Facebook, Google must forsake almost everything that brought it success in the first place. It must irreparably alter its fleet of successful web properties to become more Facebooky. It must alienate users with weird, ungooglesque features. It must force Chrome and Google down the throats of users who are simply looking for a brilliant search engine. The path towards Facebookness is fraught with strife. Facebook, as the incumbent with almost a billion active users, has a huge head start. Facebook can push onwards, continue to reap the truly monumental power of its network effect, and innovate without user backlash. Google on the other hand now has to spend the next year or two maneuvering its gribbly juggernaut between anti-trust, fair trade, and privacy allegations — all while trying to keep the users happy with a search engine that’s no better than Bing. Google is FUBAR.
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Google is FUBAR (via azspot)
Swapped my default search on all my browsers and my phone over to Bing. Spent the first week double checking against Google. Now I don’t even think about going to Google to check. I get the same search without the creepy advertising-but-not results that seem to know things about me that couldn’t have been revealed in my simple search.
(via azspot)
Once I was held captive in Kabul. I was the bride of a charming, seductive and Westernised Afghan Muslim whom I met at an American college. The purdah I experienced was relatively posh but the sequestered all-female life was not my cup of chai — nor was the male hostility to veiled, partly veiled and unveiled women in public.
“As Robert Levine describes in his book Free Ride, down this road lies a barren culture with lots of dancing kittens on YouTube but no infrastructure that can nurture future artists. Piracy enablers stress the need to maintain incentives for investment in tech companies. But maybe business models that depend on using copyrighted material for free should not attract investment in the first place.”
(via The Nation)
SOPA wasn’t a good idea, but not for most of the reasons it’s opponents said out loud. It’s number one issue was that it was completely redundant. All the tools to do what it’s authors thought they wanted already exist. It would have only served to muddy the waters. At the same time Wikipedia, Reddit, Boing Boing and the other sites that went dark in protest weren’t doing it to stand up and be counted for the sake of liberty, they were one and all worried about their business model. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it’s a little deceitful for them to portray it as anything else.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
—Mastering - a step by step guide to good sound
i still think it needs to be louder and it lacks dynamics and punch. I STILL THINK IT NEEDS TO BE LOUDER AND IT LACKS DYNAMICS AND PUNCH!
The ’70s, man. Martin Luther King Jr. is dead. Malcolm X is dead. The Kennedys are dead. Kids at Kent State are getting capped. Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix have both gone haint. Nixon’s in the Oval Office, and the Manson murders stain the Hills. Morrison and Dennis Wilson once picked up Charles Manson on Sunset and dropped him off at producer Terry “Turn Turn Turn” Melcher’s house on Cielo Drive. A few years later, Manson’s acolytes would murder Sharon Tate and four others at that house, including celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring, who styled Morrison’s original king-of-the-jungle coif.
—(via La Weekly)
He influenced my songwriting, of course. He influenced everybody’s songwriting. There’s no way around it. No one had ever really left the love song before, lyrically. So in that respect, I think he influenced everybody, because you suddenly realized you could write about other things.
—Tom Petty on Bob Dylan (via American Songwriter)
Not only did Dr. Maayan and her husband have to sit separately, as men and women were segregated at the event, but she was instructed that a male colleague would have to accept the award for her because women were not permitted on stage.
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So let me see if I understand this correctly. Dr. Maayan has the option to watch a colleague accept an award given to her for her hard work and talent because a handful of “ultra-orthodox” religious kooks hate women? Almost everyone else decides this is completely normal and the religious people should get special treatment that includes segregating the woman that actually won the award the ceremony is for. Really? They’re just a-ok with that?
(via New York Times)
