July 3, 2019
Fast Forward
Bruce Milne and Andrew Maine's Fast Forward cassette magazine documented the post-punk scene of the early 80s. The tapes interspersed interviews with music and were packaged with printed artwork in a soft case and distributed through record shops. In that pre-internet era Fast Forward helped spread sounds and ideas among music communities. Archived it offers a valuable resource for people interested in post-punk. [more inside]
The Difference Between a Good School and Choosing Whiteness and Wealth
Choosing your child's school usually starts with choosing where you live. And choosing where you live starts with looking at the grading of schools. But what if that grading was skewed implicitly and maybe purposefully toward the white rich neighborhood school rather than the economically and racially diverse school that may also provide the education that will result in the child going on to college? [more inside]
“...for all you THIRSTY gamer boys,”
It’s a troll and performance art, all at once. [Polygon] ““GamerGirl Bath Water” is exactly what it sounds like: the remains of what [cosplayer Belle] Delphine uses to clean herself. Delphine is selling it for $30, though she warns people to be careful with the liquid. “This water is not for drinking and should only be used for sentimental purposes,” the page reads. Delphine did not respond to a request for comment, so we don’t know how many people are actually purchasing the bottled water.”
firewood in the fuel tank
The Ghost has left the building
Stephen “The Ghost Who Talks” Walker, veteran Australian community radio presenter and cultural figure, has passed away. Walker was a long-running volunteer presenter, and later programme manager, on Melbourne community radio station 3RRR, and had shaped the station and the culture of Australia's vibrant community radio scene. His long-running programme, Skull Cave, ran for three hours on Friday afternoons; on it, he adopted the persona of The Ghost (loosely based on the comic-book character The Phantom), and played a broad variety of music and interviewed artists on air. Walker had been compared to John Peel for his influence, and became the first radio presenter to be inducted into the Music Victoria Awards Hall of Fame in 2011. [more inside]
Gay Icon Collages for Pride Month
"For #pridemonth I’m doing 30 days of #gay icons in collage portraits. First up: the effervescent #DorisDay..." Matt Hinrichs is a designer, artist, and collector living in Phoenix, Arizona. This year to celebrate Pride Month he created a different paper collage of a gay icon and posted it to Instagram every day. The results are pretty amazing. (Note: all links go to Instagram. Individual collages linked inside.) [more inside]
Be your own Tangerine Dream
On this website, you’ll learn the basics of using synthesizers (or synths). No prior experience or equipment is required; you’ll do everything right here in your browser. Go on, nobody else is working today either. [more inside]
1: It refuses to boost markups.
Costco is one of the world’s largest retailers, boasting 770+ locations and 245,000 employees. Last year, it had more than $140B in sales. But unlike many of its counterparts on Fortune’s Global 500 list, Costco has risen to the top by flying in the face of traditional wisdom.
disadvantage, lust, despair, international love, self-delusion
20 years ago today, Mark Sandman, frontman for the low-rock band Morphine, collapsed on stage during a concert in Palestrina, Italy. The story of the man (trailer, imdb) and the band (
imdb). [more inside]
Defining "Concentration Camp"
In 1998, as the New York Times reported at the time, An exhibit opening on Ellis Island next month will revisit an ugly chapter of modern history: the story of tens of thousands of families who, because of their ancestry, were forced from their homes during World War II and corralled into camps, encircled by barbed wire and guarded by armed sentries. The exhibit concerns the involuntary incarceration of 110,000 people of Japanese descent, the majority of them United States citizens, from 1942 to 1946, and its title is ''America's Concentration Camps: Remembering the Japanese-American Experience.'' Even before it opens, the exhibit has inspired an emotional debate over those two stark words in the title: concentration camp. [more inside]
Forgotten Landscapes
Joey is not a kangaroo word in kangaroo, but joy is the joey in jollity
What's more fun than a game you can play with words? If you're asking the dictionary, the answer is nothing ... which is why we are talking about kangaroo words today. (Dictionary.com, with ten tests of your ability to identify the hidden words) Kangaroo words contain the letters of a synonym in the correct order. The synonyms nestled inside a kangaroo word are called joey words. (ProEdit.com, with some bonus twin kangaroos joeys, and anti-kangaroos) Appendix: Kangaroo words (Wictionary list)
Professional Class As Daycare
“Here, the truth is made plain: the childlike nature of corporate branding isn’t a random trend, but part of the mindset that consumers ought to be treated like children. Details are the sinister machinations of faceless authority figures; friendly colors and geometric letters like those on a toddler’s building blocks are comforting by contrast. That each brand looks more or less like the next is only for the better: the world is a little smaller that way, less likely to confuse or frighten. As Jesse Barron wrote for Real Life magazine in 2016, “We’re in the middle of a decade of post-dignity design, whose dogma is cuteness.” Cuteness, employed as these companies do, talks down to you without words.” The Corporate Logo Singularity (Baffler)
Demogorgons, Spock with a goatee, you know the rest
Leah Broussard, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the search for "mirror matter". In a series of experiments she plans to run at Oak Ridge this summer, Broussard will send a beam of subatomic particles down a 50-foot tunnel, past a powerful magnet and into an impenetrable wall. If the setup is just right — and if the universe cooperates — some of those particles will transform into mirror-image versions of themselves, allowing them to tunnel right through the wall. And if that happens, Broussard will have uncovered the first evidence of a mirror world right alongside our own.
Valueless Money
"THE STRONG MEN"
Superhuman Is Spying on You
What if email tracked where you are, without your permission? "It is disappointing then that one of the most hyped new email clients, Superhuman, has decided to embed hidden tracking pixels inside of the emails its customers send out. Superhuman calls this feature “Read Receipts” and turns it on by default for its customers, without the consent of its recipients. "
Out of Mind
The Hidden Heroines of Chaos - "Two women programmers played a pivotal role in the birth of chaos theory. Their previously untold story illustrates the changing status of computation in science." [more inside]
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