July 10, 2014
I’m really grateful that one of my first speakers was badass Jason Momoa
"I had been creating languages for 10 years. But everybody else applying was equally skilled. So I figured the edge that I had was pretty much an endless amount of time—I was unemployed. I just decided: Well, let's just try to create the whole thing. In those rounds of judging, I created about 90 percent of the grammar—which is ridiculous for two months. Then I created 1,700 words of vocabulary—which is equally ridiculous for two months. Overall, I produced about 300 total pages of material. I figure that was probably what put it over the top."
"the conflation of money and heroism"
The rise and fall of Lance Armstrong is not simply a story of one man’s moral failures. To understand Armstrong you have to understand the people who use their money and power to shape the culture of competitive sports. And if you follow the trail of money and power in this particular case, it will lead you to Thomas Weisel, which is where the real story begins.
Heart of the Amazon, City of the Forest
For 350 years Manaus has stood sentinal at the dramatic Meeting of the Waters, where the dark Rio Negro and the sandy Rio Solimões (or the Upper Amazon) meet to form the headwaters of the Amazon River. [more inside]
two slugs hanging in a cave
Last night, popular Twitter user @rachelmillman asked her followers for their best and funniest stories about their first kiss. She got a big response. This morning, Twitter user @connorcook collected most of the tweets she received in a Storify.
#yesallthesingleladies
Treasure Trove of Archived Concert Footage
"A Very Long Routine Compared To .. The Others Foot-Juggling Acts"
Selyna Bogino (facebook, twitter) is an Italian circus performer and antipode (foot) juggler. One of her practice videos, involving five basketballs, has almost two million views on youtube since 2011. In an interview about the video, she noted that she's a fifth generation circus performer and has been practicing since she was 8 years old. She can also do amazing things with hula hoops, and with clubs (another practice video).
Moon Hooch
NPR's Bob Boilen (host of All Songs Considered): "People ask me all the time to name my favorite Tiny Desk Concert. It's my desk and I've seen almost all of the nearly 400 concerts up close. So you'd think this would be easy. Moon Hooch have made it a lot easier." (video) [more inside]
Drawing all the buildings in New York City.
All the Buildings in New York. James Gulliver Hancock, an Australian illustrator living in Astoria, draws buildings in New York City. Lots and lots of buildings. (NYTimes interview -- more press) (via) [more inside]
We Deserve Better Dressed Billionaires
"You're a rich white man.
You're used to being listened to. But while you're jabbering away, all anyone can see is your garbage shirt that you bought for twenty bucks and have been wearing all year, shoved nastily into your shiny off-the-rack suit. Why would you do this to your brand?" - Shirterate, a clothing consultation service for tech moguls by opinionated homosexuals.
Salvage, Without the Punk
“but are we not all wreckers contriving that some treasure may be washed up on our beach, that we may secure it [...]?” - Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod | A beginning: beating the meteorological odds. Fernand Braudel writes, in his famous study of the Mediterranean in the Age of Phillip, of the “Mediterranean victory over bad weather” – i.e. the advent of year-round shipping. Prior to this win over the seasons, risk could be countered only by physical division: many small ships, so that when things went bad, there was less to be lost. Yet the “victory,” emerging with the Genoese consolidation of maritime dominance and “fairs of exchange” prior to being surpassed by the Dutch, had less to do with new naval technologies than the substantiation and spread of robust insurance underwriting. This both backed riskier ventures (and therefore opened up the chance of larger-scale wrecks) and gave underwriters the rights to that wreckage, to lay “claim to any salvage.” [more inside]
“Some people call it super gun. I’m OK with that,”
The U.S. Navy has just unveiled two rail-gun prototypes that it will be testing in 2016. [video] [more inside]
Heavy metal...with a traditional touch!
Fans of history, mythology, language, and music: allow Metsatöll's Lauri Õunapuu to present his arsenal of traditional Estonian instruments. Then continue below the fold for an introduction to the world of folk metal. [more inside]
Guaranteed fondant-free
Naked Wedding Cakes Bare It All For the Summer.
Gone are the days when hot Summer weather makes icing drip down your wedding cake! Naked cakes — the trendy cakes that are mostly unfrosted — are great for warmer outdoor weddings and add a simple, elegant style to any sweet spread. By layering the cake and using a minimal amount of frosting, mainly to stick layers together or add a decorative touch, these wedding desserts offer a light sweetness in each bite. If you think that less icing means your cake will lack flair, then add fruity or flowery touches to accent the frosting and flavor. Check out these naked cakes below for inspiration!
Go ahead. Make him a vampire. Make them ALL vampires.
Living in Sudden Valley
Need temporary housing? Want to live large for less? Showhomes matches high-end vacant houses for sale with people who have beautiful furniture and need temporary housing. If you are moving from one city to another, are building a home or simply want to live in a beautiful home for a fraction of what it would normally cost, consider becoming a Showhomes Home Manager. You can enjoy a Showhome as if it were yours while it remains on the market for sale. In exchange for keeping it clean and letting buyers view the home, you get dramatically reduced monthly fees.... [more inside]
So this was where God lived.
Tucked beneath the Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn Bridge, beyond the serviceberry trees and hedgerows of the Bridge Park Greenway, across the blacktop of Furman Street, the House of God awaits. Nearly 7 million Jehovah’s Witnesses throughout the world call the collection of buildings Bethel, transliterated from the Hebrew, Beth El, "House of God." Its tall red sign, a city landmark for decades, looms over the skyline: WATCHTOWER. The building is also home to thousands of volunteers who live on the premises, all in the service, among other things, of printing the most widely circulated magazine on the planet: 46 million every month. I was supposed to live there, too. God Lives on Lemon Street: An ex–Jehovah’s Witness visits Watchtower headquarters
TREASURES!
A Piece of Monologue is a treasure trove of modern, contemporary, and avant-garde expression in literature, philosophy, art, design, painting, music, theater, and more. A smattering of insides:
Flannery O'Connor on Ayn Rand.
An online guide to the life and work of Samuel Beckett.
Twin Peaks Behind the Scenes Photographs.
Rare photographs of John Coltrane. And wow.
Fear and Loathing of the English Passive
Boardrooms Still Lack Women
Gender_Map by Data Morphosis and TWO-N demonstrates that women make up just 10.7% of all US company board members. They are best represented at Avon, where more than half the board is female. Eighteen S&P 500 companies have male directors exclusively. (Via Forbes, where the article is adorned with a pink [!] bar graph.)
"Confession doesn't just allow – it incites."
...if it felt like an author had already come into your life, already seen some aspect of your experience then it would be natural to want to extend this intimacy into conversation. The impulse to contact a confessional writer – whose writing has already revealed something private – is something else. Perhaps it is still a desire to translate one kind of intimacy into another, but the terms are different. With confessional writing, the disclosure has already happened – now the reader wants to confess something back, make a reciprocal exchange. So whenever people talk about confessional writing as navel-gazing or self-involved, I think about those voices, and their offerings.Author Leslie Jamison (previously, previouslier) explains why confessional writing is not self-indulgent. [more inside]
One subway to rule them all
"new, innovative ways to convey our findings"
The US GAO Flickr page features selected photos and graphics from US Government Accountability Office reports that are searchable, viewable, and downloadable by visitors to their site. [more inside]
Weekend at the Cabin? Sure!
io9 offers a straight forward guide of 13 tips to help you survive a night in a cabin in the woods. [more inside]
hens in, goats out
Urban Farming in Boston (Hens and Honeybees); Growing Rice in New York City; Growing Lettuce Indoors in Japan; Goats Evicted in Detroit.
I've never seen a solo cup in the flesh
CYNK Technologies
"[I]t is nothing short of a testament to just how broken this excuse for a market is that a company with no assets, no revenues, no website, and one employee can go from zero value to nearly $5 billion in market cap in a few days, adding 150%, or over $2 billion in market cap today alone." The strange story of CYNK Technologies. And while news of CYNK began spreading yesterday, the stock was, at one point today, oddly up another 57%, hitting a market cap of over $6 billion.
"Eventually, years later, I eat eggs again."
A touching sad comic about how one woman dealt with her sexual assault. (slMedium) (TW: recounting of rape)
One Doctor’s Quest to Save People by Injecting Them With Scorpion Venom
Revenge from Planet Ape
In the mid-70s, some sly film distributors decided to turn Amando de Ossorio's Tombs of the Blind Dead, a Spanish horror film, into something tangentially related to the popular Planet of the Apes franchise in order to turn a quick buck. The only problem: there are no apes in the movie. Easy fix: a new intro tacked on to the film turned the undead Knights Templar from the original version into time-traveling undead apes. [more inside]
The House of Worth
150 designs from the House of Worth. Charles Frederick Worth dominated fashion in Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century. Vogue describes the House of Worth as the first great maison de couture.
Speaking
Last month, Shanley Kane, founder of Model View Culture, (previously, previously,previouslyier, previousliest) accused a journalist of stalking and harassing her. [more inside]
The Museum of Middle School
The avant garde tweener, now 14 and headed to high school, has opened an online museum devoted to "honoring a rather ignored stage in anthropology-- Middle School" [more inside]
Open with this then
Billy Hanshaw is a VFX artist, who being also a Whovian, decided not to wait to create a new opening title for the the next Doctor. It caught the attention of Radio Times, Huffington Post, BBC America, SFX magazine and members of the Doctor Who production team
Universal Typeface Experiment
Averaging the world's handwriting to create a universal typeface. Bic is collecting handwriting samples of the Roman alphabet. You can contribute a sample on your mobile device.
Learn about societal norms by violating them and seeing how people react
Since 2010, Breanne Fahs, associate professor of women and gender studies in ASU's New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, has offered her students extra credit to personally challenge body hair norms, and document their experiences for the ten weeks during the class: men shave all their body hair from the neck down, while women don't shave. Comments from the public at large are mixed, as you might expect. But if you want to read something with more content, Fahs recently published a research article on imagined experiences of women compared to the documented experiences of her female students, titled Perilous Patches and Pitstaches: Imagined Versus Lived Experiences of Women’s Body Hair Growth (PDF)
I draw on mirrors and windows
"[Helene] Meldahl said that in the mornings she used to leave small drawings on the bathroom mirror for her roommate. One day she turned a drawing into a selfie and posted it online. She enjoyed doing it, and people enjoyed looking at it, so creating more seemed like a no-brainer." (via)
If Amy Winehouse was Ghanaian ... and flanked by a bike gang
Ghanaian R&B singer Y'akoto bemoans her lack of Perfect Timing - and the same bikers support Ghanaian/Brookylnese rapper Blitz the Ambassador reminiscing about his Ghanaian childhood in Make You No Forget (via).
"Ugliness, Empathy, and Octavia Butler"
Estrangement and unfamiliarity, particularly in relation to ugliness and the repulsiveness of the alien body, are central to her work. And this is what gets me. The non-human creatures she imagines make me cringe and their relationships with humans in her fiction are even harder to stomach. My first reaction to the Tlic race in Butler’s 1984 short story, “Bloodchild,” was disgust, made all the more unnerving because of the great care Butler seemed to take in the description of the strange species; the serpentine movements of their long, segmented bodies resemble giant worms with rows of limbs and insect-like stingers.For The Hooded Utilitarian's roundtable on Octavia Butler Qiana Whitted looks at how Butler uses revulsion and disgust to make the reader work to find empathy with the Other. [more inside]
The CIA is a prescriptivist scold
Writing tips from the CIA’s ruthless style manual:
Strunk & White, it turns out, were CIA sources. The authors of The Elements of Style, a classic American writing guide, are cited alongside Henry Fowler, Wilson Follett, and Jacques Barzun in the Directorate of Intelligence’s Style Manual & Writers Guide for Intelligence Publications, whose eighth edition (from 2011) was quietly posted online (pdf) by the legal nonprofit National Security Counselors a little over a year ago, following a Freedom of Information Act request. [more inside]
Strunk & White, it turns out, were CIA sources. The authors of The Elements of Style, a classic American writing guide, are cited alongside Henry Fowler, Wilson Follett, and Jacques Barzun in the Directorate of Intelligence’s Style Manual & Writers Guide for Intelligence Publications, whose eighth edition (from 2011) was quietly posted online (pdf) by the legal nonprofit National Security Counselors a little over a year ago, following a Freedom of Information Act request. [more inside]
Professor Shyguy chiptunes Tightrope
Chiptune musician Professor Shyguy does a cover of Janelle Monae's Tightrope, and pretty much nails it.
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