Intriguing piece from @megangarber about our cognitive relationship with screens, the web.

Great news for digital arts/artists --> New MIT Business Plan Competition Takes on the Arts via @BW

Next time student/journo/etc. asks me to intro them to sex workers "to tell their stories," I'll reply w/ @stoya's:

Afternoon reading. Rosler on art speak. #eflux

.@notrobwalker asked me, @alexismadrigal @jomc @Kevin2Kelly @Rushkoff to describe our most outdated devices >>

It is poetic that the Web was born out of exasperation with having to make human contact.

@zingbot @adamhrv @jomc not Elvis embracing Nixon?

@jomc Hello. I drew you!

@vectorpoem @jomc @ballardian funny how we often cute animals sigils in our mediums. 1st cinema closeup was of a cat?

.@jomc there's something ridiculous beautiful and transient and sad there. The site is gone, now fading archive links

.@jomc I found his death strangely staggering as if web had potential for new emotive space & profound in the prosaic

"Ego: The Strange and Wonderful World of Self-Portraits," a BBC doc I'd love to get my hands on now: (via @amyhoy)

The psychology of trans girlhood is a curious, liminal space existing somewhere between the generalities of cis girl and boyhood. But it’s also remarkably internal, shivering beneath a shell of deeply, unwillingly affected gender, preventing social interaction (for good or ill) as—in my case—a woman. As I grew up, I felt feminine self-loathing, the acute threat of men’s power and privilege and strangely vulnerable when I was around powerful men engaged in rape apologism. And for all that fear and loathing, I could not claim womanhood with any pride or confidence; I tried to shrink ever deeper into that torturous iron maiden of a shell.
Strangely enough, it was playing World of Warcraft where I learned how to be a proud woman in the midst of a patriarchal society, and where my transgender transition would properly begin in earnest.

Excellent article on former Sublime Frequencies artist (& current Syrian regime sympathizer?) Omar Souleyman

Virtually everything the government did to WikiLeaks is now being done to mainstream US reporters

Of course if the category was called Bitch of the Year not Thinker it would be all chicks am I right guys?!

‘The Dance Of Reality’: First look at new film from Alejandro Jodorowsky via @dangermindsblog

Von Trier's new film uses CGI to merge stars' upper bodies faking sex with porno actors lower bodies doing for real.

There is a Conet Project radio station on Pandora: (via @ginorobair)

That said, the OED reckons "innovated" as an adjective is valid usage. For the 1600s.

Via @datacenter: "members of the Facebook corporate team all used Gmail accounts to hide the company’s identity"

Writers & artists on the power of photography: time, mortality and memory:

Stanislaw Lem: the man who broke the future

A clear falsehood shared with critics is better than vague mush

Beuys liked to give the impression that he had been a pilot rather than merely a radio operator.

There is no doubt that Beuys belonged to a generation that revered heroes, went to war with blind enthusiasm and was then traumatized. Many of them had blood on their hands but refused to admit it to themselves or others. It was a deeply conflicted generation.

Riegel says that people overlooked these contradictory aspects of the artist's personality for a long time. Perhaps this was because Beuys, in contrast to many of his contemporaries, didn't try to keep his past a secret -- neither the fact that he volunteered for military service, nor that pacifism is cowardice, in his opinion. He appeared to stand by the controversial aspects of his personality, and that made him seem more honest.

Sandy Valdivieso and her Husband Triet Vo had wanted to fly from LA to the African city of Dakar, Senegal, but mistakenly ended up on a flight to Dhaka, Bangladesh. It turns out the mishap all came down to the three-letter airport code airlines routinely use when making bookings or entering information on baggage tags. Instead of entering DKR (for Dakar) in the computer system, the airline representative entered DAC (for Dhaka), sparking the intercontinental travel nightmare.
The couple, flying on Turkish Airlines, transited in Istanbul before joining their connecting flight to what they thought would be Dakar. They told the LA Times they didn't notice anything was wrong, because they went by the flight number on their tickets. And the similarity in city names didn't help matters. "When the flight attendant said we were heading to Dhaka, we believed that this was how you pronounced 'Dakar' with a Turkish accent," Valdivieso said.

Samuel Delany, PS 1 today. (via @Triple_Canopy)

Jean Cocteau on Orson Welles

or *this* on making sense of systems, by @caseyg:

like *this* on nostalgia and hyperreality by @jomc:

"Think of all the people you have photos of whose voices you will never hear again." on The Museum of Loneliness:

The universe doesn't exist. It happens.

via na (see also: all my tears)

The very best type of music spammers — the ones whose music elicits the best mix of hysterical laughter and retributive threats when you play them for friends — are the cloners. These groups record their own versions of popular songs, replicating the originals as closely as possible with whatever time and talent they have. (Spoiler: Often, that’s not very closely.)
These cloned songs are credited to “artists” such as The Hit Crew, Hip Hop’s Finest, #1 Hits Now, DJ New Release — names that could, and often do, pass for compilation titles. They might be named after the very song they’re cloning (“Call Me Maybe,” “Thrift Shop”) or a lyric from it (“Here’s My Number,” “Party Rock Is In The House Tonight”). The name doesn’t matter, so long as it’s close enough to fool people into clicking on the track without thinking twice.

Later, I began to feel angry and foolish at what I saw as a betrayal — I called him conceited and deceitful and he looked appalled and hurt by the accusation.

What I saw as brazenly and intentionally playing with people’s feelings, to him was about serving his country. He’d never chosen the ugly, but unavoidable, side-effects that his job would play on his private life. ...I loved him dearly and, before I found out about his other life, I really believed he could be the future father of my children. But you can’t ‘un-know’ something and once I found out his secret, it drove us apart — it’s very hard to get over the fact that you’ve been lied to, and you become suspicious about everything else.

To lie, of course, is to engender insanity.
August 1932 Henry and June
I see myself wrapped in lies, which do not seem to penetrate my soul, as if they are not really a part of me. They are like costumes.
August 1932 Henry and June

anyway, even if he didn't invent Bitcoin, Shinichi Mochizuki is a super interesting dude

So, @dunagan23 on @IFTF's 'Internet Human' programme meshes well with @jomc's call for windows-for-the-internet:

Without a more strategic merging between the physical world and the digital, Schmidt suggested, that scenario could well become reality. For now, Cohen said, the big question looming before us is this: "At what point is a cyber attack so big that its effects spill over into the physical world?" We don't yet know. But there's a good chance we'll soon find out.

The project centers on nine women in the feminist lesbian porn industry who are recorded for a 24-hour period, with 10-second blips of their everyday lives playing out in five-minute intervals. What’s revealed is an intimate portrait of a marginalized community opening up about sex, gender politics, depression, and their daily grind in a way that’s downright real.

SPOTTED: Google Glass at the gay bar

An abandoned space cannon, a forgotten Texan particle accelerator & the world's least-secret secret listening station

'We need a new narrative in which we frame migration as a way for people to adapt to climate change':
Apart from people's own rejection of the "climate refugee" term there are also several other problems. It's clear that there are connections between climate change and the movement of people, but the connections are not as clear as the "climate refugee" narrative suggests. The phrase conjures images of large numbers of people moving en masse over long distances and crossing international borders and possibly continents. It seems unlikely that climate change will produce this kind of human movement.

What seems more likely is that climate change might reinforce existing trends in short-term, short distance migration. For example, as subsistence farmers find it increasingly difficult to make a living in rural areas they may move to nearby cities to find work. Whole towns or villages will not move together: in fact, families may not even move together. Far more likely is that one or two household members will move, find work elsewhere and send money home to their community.

via andy

Researchers at the University of Glasgow develop a system that can deliver 3D imaging without a camera or lenses:

Neuroscientists find 'tetrachromat', woman who sees 99 million more colours than ordinary humans

This is one of those tiny things that are actually a huge deal. For years the web worked in a very sensible way. The role of users was to put things into the box; the role of the web company was to make it look pretty. But now that dynamic has changed, radically. The role of the web company is to make it easy for users to make pretty (or at least sensibly structured, logically arranged) things on their own. No longer do users write, then preview, then publish. Now they just—edit. Which is the same as publishing. And just about everything you see on any website anywhere is, theoretically, editable.

December 13th, 2005 | researchmaterial
Tina Treason on the Melissa Gira quote a few entries down:

i’ve tried to explain this to people before but no one seems to understand what i mean when i say we are a generation without secrets. anything anyone could do to us, anything we could do to ourselves has already been splayed out in all its bloody glory on some talk show, or lifetime special, or reality tv. nothing in us is sacred, nothing hides itself away for the sake of staying sacred. we’ve been horrifically exposed and so we know nothing other than how to expose ourselves in the most painful ways.

"I was remembering what my mother told me about olives "you keep eating them, and soon you begin to enjoy them. An acquired taste. The implication is that certain pleasures are learned, are worked for. They are nonetheless pleasurable for being the product of effort." Suggesting we can retrain ourselves to have a sexual interest where there currently isn't one sounds perhaps possible, but like a lot of bloody work.

He had a cute quip about not being Gay: "At my age now,” he said, “I'm just a little bit cheerful." He wrote that he was quite fascinated with the role homosexuals have played down through time as revolutionary thinkers. (In our correspondence, he expressed great interest in C.A. Tripp’s book about Abraham Lincoln as Gay.) He kept a private collection of writing which is not to be published until 50 years after his death. I’d wager the world is going to receive the open acknowledgement of his homosexuality and of his theory about gay consciousness as revolutionary come 2058.

There’s also a PayPal button by which you can ‘donate’ $1.15 to her when you buy The Last Samurai second-hand, thus paying the author roughly the same as she would get in royalties from a book sold new. ‘The norm in traditional publishing is for a second-hand book … to bring no financial benefit to the author – the book may have saved the reader from suicide, but there’s no mechanism for the reader to acknowledge the person who made this possible.’ Suicide, pro and contra, is a big theme in The Last Samurai, so this is not as melodramatic a thought as it may appear.

Well, look, all this anxiety about getting a technically difficult book into print would be irrelevant to online publication. If I type in some text in Greek, or Arabic, or Japanese, if I use equations, or statistical graphics, or images, I can put something online that looks exactly like what I see on my screen. It won't get converted to gibberish by Quark or InDesign; corrections will not have to be input by someone who doesn't know what he's doing. For the most part, it will be right. And if there are careless mistakes, people in etherworld with relevant expertise will spot those mistakes and tell me and they can be fixed.

The bitcoin store has been approved by :)

Bill Murray on Gilda Radner:

The unnamed woman became alarmed after seeing something slip into her changing room and alerted the store manager, Stephanie Williams. The two then allegedly witnessed Finocchio trying to spy on a 28-year-old woman.

Williams told the New York Post she knocked on the professor's dressing-room door and demanded that he come out at once.

When Finocchio finally emerged, Williams said he was 'sweating profusely.' Williams led the professor to the front of the store and had a co-worker call police.

Dear everyone: read this now. On Audre Lorde, health care, self-care, and women's work