Long [-ish] reads
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- Nairn1
'I see pitchforks'
— Nick Hanauer (early Amazon investor, part of the 0.1%)https://www.politico.com/magazin… (2014)
'You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising.'
- imbecile2
Joe Arridy Was the Happiest Man on Death Row
https://www.westword.com/news/jo…
Joe Arridy didn't ask for a last meal. It's doubtful that he even understood the concept. He was 23 years old and had an IQ of 46. He knew about eating and playing and trains, things you could see and smell and experience. But abstractions, like God and justice and evil, eluded him.
- Bennn0
dont know where to post this one:
''The Unsolved Case of the Most Mysterious Song on the Internet''
- grafician1
https://www.theatlantic.com/maga…
"History’s Largest Mining Operation Is About to Begin
It’s underwater—and the consequences are unimaginable."- jesus, I had no idea those cunts at de Beers were already engaged in this sort of industry. 'Thanks'.Nairn
- grafician1
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/…
Pretty nice article about Tom Hanks, this man is a very good example of a good human being, as good as it gets
- imbecile2
on abortion and women's reproductive rights...
https://twitter.com/designmom/st…
- grafician0
"How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation"
The most interesting article I've read this year so far...
"Freelance graphic artists operating on their own schedule without health care or paid time off have burnout." < that's most of us...
- link?imbecile
- part of the problem here is calling buzzfeed news... as you wereimbecile
- https://www.buzzfeed…grafician
- @imbecile just read it, make up your mind latergrafician
- @QBN we need an edit-post function or something...grafician
- i've read versions of this burnout thing before. i laugh at it being millennial related considering any freelancer in any field can relate, self included at 40+imbecile
- @imbe: you can read between the lines, not just a "millennial" thing, but 100% still true...grafician
- Khurram0
[h1]Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek[/h1]
https://www.counterpunch.org/202…
One of the most prominent intellectuals in the contemporary world was named to the list of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers” in Foreign Policy magazine in 2012.[1] He shares this distinction with the likes of Dick Cheney, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Benjamin Netanyahu, and former Mossad director Meir Dagan. The theorist’s best idea—according to this well-known publication that is a virtual arm of the U.S. State Department—is that “the big revolution the left is waiting for will never come.”[2]
Other ideas were surely strong contenders, and we could add to the list more recent positions. To select but a few examples, this top global thinker has described 20th-century communism, and more specifically Stalinism, as “maybe the worst ideological, political, ethical, social (and so on) catastrophe in the history of humanity.”[3] As a matter of fact, he adds for emphasis that “if you measure at some abstract level of suffering, Stalinism was worse than Nazism,” apparently regretting that the Red Army under Stalin defeated the Nazi war machine.[4] The Third Reich was not as “radical” in its violence as communism, he insists, and “the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough.”[5] Perhaps he could have taken some tips from Mao Zedong who, according to this theoretical grandee, made a “ruthless decision to starve tens of millions to death.”[6] This undocumented assertion positions its author well to the right of the anti-communist Black Book of Communism, which recognized that Mao did not intend to kill his compatriots.[7] Such information is of no import, however, to this theorist since he operates on the assumption that the worst ‘crime against humanity’ in the modern world was not Nazism or fascism, but rather communism.
The thinker in question is also a self-declared Eurocentric who intimates that Europe is politically, morally, and intellectually superior to all other regions of planet Earth.[8] When the European refugee crisis was intensified due to brutal Western military interventions around the wider Mediterranean region, he parroted Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ credo by declaring that “it is a simple fact that most of the refugees come from a culture that is incompatible with Western European notions of human rights.”[9] This top-tier pundit also endorsed Donald Trump for president in the 2016 election.[10] More recently, he explicitly positioned himself to the right of the notorious warmonger Henry Kissinger by accusing the latter of “pacifism” and expressing his “full support” for the U.S. proxy war in the Ukraine, claiming that “we need a stronger NATO” to defend “European unity.”[11]
Being fêted by the preeminent journal co-founded by the arch-conservative national security state operative Huntington is only the tip of the iceberg for this global superstar, who has achieved a level of international fame rarely accorded to professional intellectuals.[12] In addition to being an academic celebrity with prestigious appointments at leading institutions in the capitalist world and innumerable international junkets, he has consolidated an enormous media platform. This includes publishing books and articles at a dizzying speed for some of the most prominent outlets, serving as the subject of multiple films, and regularly appearing on television and in major media spectacles.
Given the nature of these political positions and their amplification by the bourgeois cultural apparatus, one might assume that the thinker in question is a rightwing ideologue promoted by imperialist think tanks and the U.S. national security state. On the contrary, however, this is a commentator that anyone perusing online for radical theory or even Marxism is likely to encounter almost immediately, because he is one of the most visible intellectuals taken to represent the Left: Slavoj Žižek.
Donald Trump expressed his belief in the power of the U.S. propaganda machine by infamously claiming that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing a single voter.[13] In our perverse and decadent society of the spectacle within the imperialist core, much the same applies to the poster child for the global theory industry. Žižek could take the most reactionary political positions imaginable, have them broadcast around the world by the capitalist cultural apparatus, and still be presented as a towering intellectual of the Left. As a matter of fact, he has done precisely that.
[b]Discursive Sausage for the Uneducated[/b]...
- Nairn0
https://longreads.com/2017/09/12…
I want to eat here. I don't even much like lamb.
- Lambs that lives outside eating grass = far cleaner + healthier meat than beef/chicken/pork.shapesalad
- imbecile0
He Planned a Treasure Hunt for the Ages — Until He Went Missing
Hunter Lewis was an adventure-lover who spent two years devising an elaborate outdoor quest for his friends and family, only to see it end in tragedy
https://www.rollingstone.com/cul…
Let’s start at journey’s end. Some adventures exact a terrible cost.
It’s the last Sunday in January. More than 300 guests walk single file into the Arcata Community Center in far North California. Some wear blazers with sneakers, and some wear gingham dresses with muddy hiking boots. They patiently wait their turn and then sign their names into the guest book.
They are here to celebrate an extraordinary young man. His achievements are perfectly organized and displayed chronologically on a series of tables. There he is as a little boy with his father and grandfather preparing to launch a rocket into the Colorado sky. There are snapshots of a handsome kid with lank hair climbing on rocks, and another where he is playing his guitar. Then a pair of blue canvas shoes with sand still clinging to shredded soles.
You glance up and see someone who resembles the young man. It’s his brother. He’s a different kind of free spirit, with glasses and blond-green hair, his skinny body clad in Doc Martens, a Phish hoodie, and a Bikini Kill T-shirt. He stops for a moment and looks at the different stages of his brother’s travels, and then moves on alone.
...
- hans_glib0
td:dr
- Bennn1
Really captivating story of a hiker who died on the AT in 2017, he's still unidentified to this day... just start reading the article, its like a true crime series on Netflix
- grafician0
"The Greatest Privilege We Never Talk About: Beauty"
"The benefits of being attractive are exorbitant. Beauty might be the single greatest physical advantage you can have in life*. And yet compared to other other privileges that may arise from race, gender, or sexuality, we don’t talk much about it."
https://medium.com/@sfard/the-gr…
"Attractive people are more likely to be seen as competent and be hired for a job (Busetta, 2013). They are perceived as smarter and having more social grace (Kanasawa, 2010). They are perceived to have better personality qualities like trustworthiness (Dewolf 2014). They are perceived as kinder (Snyder, Tanke and Berscheid 1977). They are more persuasive. They are more likely to benefit from acts of kindness from a stranger. They have greater self esteem (Thornton, 1991)."
- webazoot1
Do You Want To Produce Music Or Run A Tape Machine Museum?
Here at ATA Records we pride ourselves on the methods that we have chosen to make our music, mainly recording analog to tape and pressing up vinyl. Not only are we recording to tape we are using the equipment that sonically best represents the style of music we are recording. This involves a lot of vintage recording equipment and with that comes many hurdles.
- webazoot1
"Robert Pattinson cooks his “fast food version” of pasta...
Last year, he says, he had a business idea. What if, he said to himself, “pasta really had the same kind of fast-food credentials as burgers and pizzas? I was trying to figure out how to capitalize in this area of the market, and I was trying to think: How do you make a pasta which you can hold in your hand?”
He says he went so far as to design a prototype that involved the use of a panini press, and then, he says, he went even further, setting up a meeting with Los Angeles restaurant royalty Lele Massimini, the cofounder of Sugarfish and proprietor of the Santa Monica pasta restaurant Uovo. “And I told him my business plan,” Pattinson recalls, “and his facial expression didn’t even change afterwards. Let alone acknowledge what my plan was. There was absolutely no sign of anything from him, literally. And so it kind of put me off a little bit.” (Massimini says: “It’s 100 percent true, everything he told you.”)
Nevertheless, Pattinson says, he conceived of a brand name for his product, a soft little moniker that kind of summed up what he thought his pasta creation looked like: Piccolini Cuscino. Little Pillow. He thought he’d give the product another go, with me now: “Maybe if I say it in GQ, maybe, like, a partner will just come along.”
So he now takes hold of the bag that he’s brought from the corner store, out of which he produces the following:
One (1) giant, filthy, dust-covered box of cornflakes. (“I went to the shop, and they didn’t sell breadcrumbs. I’m like, ‘Oh, fuck it! I’m just getting cornflakes. That’s basically the same shit.’ ”)
One (1) incredibly large novelty lighter. (“I always liked the idea of doing a little flambé, like the brand name, with kind of burnt ends at the top.”)
Nine (9) packs of presliced cheese. (“I got, like, nine packs of presliced cheese.”)
Sauce. (Like a tomato sauce? “Just any sauce.”)
He puts on latex gloves. He pulls out some sugar and some aluminum foil and makes a bed, a kind of hollowed-out sphere, with the foil. He holds up a box of penne pasta that he had in the house. “All right,” Pattinson says. “So obviously, first things first, you gotta microwave the pasta.”
I watch as he pours dry penne into a cereal bowl, covers it with water, and places it in the microwave for eight minutes. He says using penne is already new territory for him. Usually he uses...well... “Do you know the pasta that’s, like, a little, it’s like a blob, a sort of squiggly blob?”
“Gnocchi?”
“No, no, no, no, it looks like—what would you even call it? It looks like a sort of messy...like, the hair bun on a girl.”
“I have literally no idea what you’re talking about,” I say.
“There was one type of pasta that worked. It definitely wasn’t penne.”
Nevertheless, penne and water in the microwave for eight minutes. In the meantime, he takes the foil and he begins dumping sugar on top of it. “I found after a lot of experimentation that you really need to congeal everything in an enormous amount of sugar and cheese.” So after the sugar, he opens his first package of cheese and begins layering slice after slice onto the sugar-foil. Then more sugar: “It really needs a sugar crust.”
Then he realizes that he’s forgotten the outer layer, which is supposed to be breadcrumbs but today will be crushed-up cornflakes, and so he lifts the pile of cheese and sugar and crumbles some cornflakes onto the aluminum foil before placing the sugar-cheese back on top of it. Then he adds sauce, which is red. The microwave dings, and Pattinson promptly burns himself on the bowl of pasta. He sighs, heavily, looking at it. “No idea if it’s cooked or not.” He dumps the pasta in anyway. At this point, his spirits have visibly begun to flag. “I mean, there’s absolutely no chance this is gonna work. Absolutely none.”
The little pillow now mostly built, he pours more sugar on top of it and then produces the top half of a bun, which he hollows out, places it on top of the rest of whatever the hell this thing is, and...begins burning the top of the bun with the giant novelty lighter. “I’m just gonna do the initials....”
“You look like you’re cooking meth,” I say, because he does.
“I’m really trying to sell this company. I’m doing this for my brand.”
At this point, he accidentally ignites one of his latex gloves, which promptly melts onto his palm. He yells in pain. Then he gingerly holds up the finished product: some approximation of a P, followed by a C, for Piccolini Cuscino, burned into the top of a hamburger bun.
He starts wrapping the whole thing up with more aluminum foil, and then compacts it, and then wraps it some more, and then squeezes it again. Suddenly he stops: “Can you actually put foil in an oven?”
I say yes, you can, but what you absolutely cannot do is put foil in a microwave. And he says cool, cool, and then he goes looking for his oven, which he’s never used before, and this is a nice house, so there are multiple options, and the one he settles on, well: It looks like another microwave to me. He assures me it is not.
“I reckon probably...10 minutes?”
He puts the aluminum sphere, the little pillow, into what he thinks is an oven and I think is a microwave. He attempts to turn it on. “I actually knew how to do this before,” he tells me. “I literally did this yesterday. And now it’s just impossible. It’s going to look like I can’t cook at all.”
He fumbles at some more buttons. “Oh, oh, oh,” he says, excitedly now. “A thousand watts, there you go.”
Proudly he is walking back toward the counter that his phone is on when, behind him, a lightning bolt erupts from the oven/microwave, and Pattinson ducks like someone outside has opened fire. He’s giggling and crouching as the oven throws off stray flickers of light and sound.
“The fucking electricity...oh, my God,” he says, still on the floor. And then, with a loud, final bang, the oven/microwave goes dark.
In the silence, Pattinson and I both stare at the mysterious piece of machinery built into the wall behind him.
“Yeah, I think I have to leave that alone,” he says, sighing again, picking himself off the floor. “But that is a Piccolini Cuscino.”"
- grafician0
Unexpected but this was good:
"We have seen a lot this year. After curating and sharing 2,411 links with 358,917 designers all around the world, we have identified a few of the trends our industry has been writing, talking, and thinking about. Here’s what to expect for UX in 2020."