Omnibus is a new collaborative company focused on web typography. The main challenge is to provide webfonts at the highest aesthetic and technical level.

For as long as I can remember, climate campaigns have been animated by the same basic idea: big ad outreach, lots of strange bedfellows from the military, business, or celebrity worlds, educational town halls, all pushing for broader awareness and engagement on the issue. These campaigns avoid specific policies or politicians out of fear of being divisive. They seek, like Kerry, to bring everyone together around the table. […] There have been many, many credulous stories over the years, starting in the early 2000s, that conservatives are on the verge of coming around on climate change — that the youth are demanding change and a few brave Republicans are speaking up. The narrative rarely changes; the list of brave Republicans rarely changes; the heralded shift never arrives. Yet Democrats, especially those who consider themselves moderate and open to compromise, have trouble letting go of the dream. […] All young people today have ever seen is Republicans trying to tear those institutions down. They witnessed the theft of the 2000 presidential election; 9/11; the horrifically botched response to 9/11; the Iraq War; Hurricane Katrina; the 2008 financial crisis; the Tea Party’s frenzied resistance to the first black president; the birther conspiracy and the endless conspiracy theories to follow; and finally, the triumph of Donald Trump and unbridled American white supremacy. […] The Democratic elite has always seemed to believe that there’s a large, silent, persuadable middle out there that just needs to be told the news about climate change. But youth activists believe that the lines have been drawn, left and right, and most everybody is already on one side or another. “There is no conservative or moderate solution to climate change,” Evan Weber of the Sunrise Movement told me. “There’s no quick market fix or easy bipartisan compromise waiting to be had. Actual solutions to climate change go against everything that the Republican Party stands for, and dealing with the climate crisis through a ‘moderate’ approach will mean the suffering and death of untold millions.” […] Because the left is an unwieldy coalition of diverse interest groups and the right is more ethnically and ideologically homogeneous (see Matt Grossman’s Asymmetric Politics), the conflict often shakes out as: the left’s climate people vs. the entire right (and some parts of the left); the left’s labor people vs. the entire right (and some parts of the left); the left’s poverty people vs. the entire right (and some parts of the left); the left’s judicial reform people vs. the entire right (and some parts of the left); and so on. Because the right sees a lump of evil everywhere outside its bubble, it is always mobilized, hyped up by a paranoid media ecosystem to see the threat of socialism behind every tax credit or efficiency standard. The left can rarely summon such intense unanimity, except perhaps on Social Security, LGBTQ marriage, and a few other issues. Long story short, lots and lots of people who agree that climate change is a problem and that something ought to be done are nonetheless sitting out elections and the larger political process. They don’t need to be educated or made more aware. They need someone to pull their asses off the couch and get them voting and fighting. […] Lovers of bipartisanship are forever saying that a truly comprehensive solution to climate change is only possible with bipartisan support, and that may be true. But unified Republican opposition is making bipartisan cooperation impossible, and there’s no time to wait.

If at some point I have to abandon iTunes… Drag-n-drop and Music, Ringtones, Videos, PDF & ePUB files into any Apple device without iTunes (& no extra apps).

PRISM was founded during the George W. Bush administration, as part of a widespread erosion of civil liberties under the Protect America Act. While Obama campaigned with criticism of the Bush Doctrine, his administration took full advantage of the powers it secured for the executive branch. Many of these Bush-era policies, like the Patriot Act and amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, were extended or amplified by Obama. For optimistic liberals, it was different. Bush was an idiot redneck, but Obama, the constitutional law professor who spent an hour reading at the White House each night and knew Beyoncé personally, could be trusted with those powers. “I don’t think President Bush would have been able to expand the drone campaign in the way that Obama eventually did,” former ACLU deputy director Jameel Jaffer told the Atlantic. “Now we’ve invested all this power in the presidency, and all that power will be available to President Trump and whoever comes after President Trump.” It was no accident. Obama entrenched those policies even further on his way out the door, before handing the keys to Donald Trump. “In its final days, the Obama administration has expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies,” the New York Times reported. The allure of Obama’s cultural sophistication created a blind spot, and the consequences continue to reverberate. […] There is a difference between what you like and what you’re like that is easily observable in someone who once held the highest office in the country. While Barack Obama reads about surveillance capitalism, Donald Trump presides over an executive office that holds the power to enforce it. It’s thanks to Obama he has it.

By 1900, electric cars were so popular that New York City had a fleet of electric taxis, and electric cars accounted for a third of all vehicles on the road. People liked them because in many ways early electric cars outperformed their gas competitors. Electric cars didn’t have the smell, noise, or vibration found in steam or gasoline cars. They were easier to operate, lacked a manual crank to start, and didn’t require the same difficult-to-change gear system as gas cars. […] When Henry Ford introduced the mass-produced and gas-powered Model T in 1908, it symbolized a death blow to the electric car. By 1912, a gasoline car cost only $650 while the average electric roadster sold for $1,750. In 1912 Charles Kettering also invented the first electric automobile starer. Effectively eliminating the hand crank, Kettering’s invention made the gas-powered auto even more attractive to the same drivers who had preferred electric cars.

You can't build anything with five hex codes. To build something real, you need a much more comprehensive set of colors to choose from.

DeForrest Brown, Jr. went to the Dweller Festival and asked the question, can one celebrate Black underground artists and audiences in a gentrified genre? --- And it must be clearly understood: dance music, in all of its various forms, was born in Blackness, patterning itself after the communities, spaces and shared skills that were built in hopes of finding a specific kind of respite, and an alternate future. Techno in particular has been a music riddled with misconceptions and distorted histories, whose global popularity has unfortunately scrubbed away its origins in Black American culture. Fundamentally, techno is a rhythm and soul-based music developed in 1980s Detroit, using Motown studio production techniques, jazz and funk. Though largely adjacent to house music, techno is distinctly from Detroit, whereas house was rooted in Chicago; and both share their technologically progressive, DJ-based DNA with hip-hop, forming the holy trinity of Black dance-floor Utopias of the late 20th century.

How to use production images in a development environment with Local by Flywheel.

Jeremy Larson’s favorite moments in music in 2019. Reportedly inspired somewhat by my 'Favorite Sounds of [year]’ lists I've been doing.

It’s great that this can be done. This is weird process.

DeForrest Brown Jr., aka Speaker Music, breaks down the timeline of techno's history, Nina Kraviz controversy and speaks to Discowman and more. --- An honest revision of techno’s history would follow a trail of themes like white extractive capitalism, white flight and re-urbanization and the economics of cultural theft. Technocracy relies on the withholding and hoarding of information and resources to uphold standards set by a controlling an often immoral elite class. An item or an experience is given value by certain standards within a technocracy and by decentralizing current narratives and allowing for creators to tell their own stories, there is opportunity for a more even and ethical cultural exchange across the unfortunate circumstance of an economic market established by violent and willfully ignorant white European colonial ideology.

Dialectical behavior therapy is a type of cognitive-behavioral therapy that combines strategies like mindfulness, acceptance, and emotion regulation. […] In DBT, the patient and therapist are working to resolve the seeming contradiction between self-acceptance and change in order to bring about positive changes in the patient.

Write is a minimal WordPress theme for users focused on writing. It’s designed to keep decorations to a minimum and put your writing in the spotlight.

A tool for building out comma-separated multiple box-shadows, which result in a much smoother and more natural look.

Johanna Hedva lives with chronic illness and their Sick Woman Theory is for those who were never meant to survive but did. Her fellow spoonies. --- If we take Hannah Arendt’s definition of the political – which is still one of the most dominant in mainstream discourse – as being any action that is performed in public, we must contend with the implications of what that excludes. If being present in public is what is required to be political, then whole swathes of the population can be deemed a-political – simply because they are not physically able to get their bodies into the street. […] There are two failures here, though. The first is her reliance on a “public” – which requires a private, a binary between visible and invisible space. This meant that whatever takes place in private is not political. So, you can beat your wife in private and it doesn’t matter, for instance. You can send private emails containing racial slurs, but since they weren’t “meant for the public,” you are somehow not racist. Arendt was worried that if everything can be considered political, then nothing will be, which is why she divided the space into one that is political and one that is not. But for the sake of this anxiety, she chose to sacrifice whole groups of people, to continue to banish them to invisibility and political irrelevance. She chose to keep them out of the public sphere. […] Sick Woman Theory is an insistence that most modes of political protest are internalized, lived, embodied, suffering, and no doubt invisible. Sick Woman Theory redefines existence in a body as something that is primarily and always vulnerable, following from Judith Butler’s work on precarity and resistance. Because the premise insists that a body is defined by its vulnerability, not temporarily affected by it, the implication is that it is continuously reliant on infrastructures of support in order to endure, and so we need to re-shape the world around this fact. Sick Woman Theory maintains that the body and mind are sensitive and reactive to regimes of oppression – particularly our current regime of neoliberal, white-supremacist, imperial-capitalist, cis-hetero-patriarchy. It is that all of our bodies and minds carry the historical trauma of this, that it is the world itself that is making and keeping us sick. […] “Sickness” as we speak of it today is a capitalist construct, as is its perceived binary opposite, “wellness.” The “well” person is the person well enough to go to work. The “sick” person is the one who can’t. What is so destructive about conceiving of wellness as the default, as the standard mode of existence, is that it invents illness as temporary. When being sick is an abhorrence to the norm, it allows us to conceive of care and support in the same way. […] The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.

Is there a dietary treatment for multiple sclerosis? And if so, why is the medical establishment ignoring published academic research that started in the 1950s proving it? --- Clinical research evolved the way it did for sound reasons, but the new standards came, as innovations will, with complications of their own. It’s easy—and tempting, given the profits involved—to paint all this as the corporate conspiracy of Big Pharma, but the real problem is rooted in something else. We’re in the middle of a generalized epistemological failure brought on by a too-narrow understanding of “proof.” We’re in thrall to the tyranny of data. This deeper problem both weakens our clinical research institutions, and makes them vulnerable to charlatans and profiteers. […] In Montreal, Roy Swank made observations, took measurements, and then constructed an argument about multiple sclerosis which, while it cannot be proved, may yet be useful. But by narrowing the field of “proof” or reliable information to include only that which can be supplied by the results of randomized controlled trials, people like Dr. F. have lost the ability to evaluate the worth of a useful argument like Swank’s, let alone construct one. The growing intensity of commercial and regulatory pressures on scientific research has worsened the rhetorical climate still further. This is the source of our epistemological catastrophe in both the medical profession, and in the broader scientific community.

Open-source voice assistant. Gladys is an open-source program which runs on your Raspberry Pi. She integrates into your life, seamlessly communicating across your entire home network and your devices while checking your calendar.

Mycroft is the world’s first open source voice assistant.

A collection of birds looking right at me!

The audio from your favorite events isn't real. It's much better than real. --- Just to walk through the logic: based on the sound of arrows in a fictional Kevin Costner movie, Baxter created the sonic experience of sitting between the archer and the target, something no live spectator could do. […] "That afternoon we went out on a canoe with a couple of rowers recorded stereo samples of the different type of effects that would be somewhat typical of an event," Baxter recalls. "And then we loaded those recordings into a sampler and played them back to cover the shots of the boats." The real sound, of course, would have included engine noises and a helicopter whirring overhead. The fake sound seemed normal, just oars sliding into water. In a sense, the real sound was as much of a human creation as the fake sound, and probably a lot less pleasant to listen to.

Political reporters were taken aback by Hillary Clinton’s charge that half of Trump’s supporters are prejudiced. Few bothered to investigate the claim itself. --- Indeed, what Breitbart understood, what his spiritual heir Donald Trump has banked on, what Hillary Clinton’s recent pillorying has clarified, is that white grievance, no matter how ill-founded, can never be humiliating nor disqualifying. On the contrary, it is a right to be respected at every level of American society from the beer-hall to the penthouse to the newsroom. […] It is easy enough to look into Clinton’s claim and verify it or falsify it. The numbers are all around us. And the story need not end there. A curious journalist might ask what those numbers mean, or even push further, and ask what it means that the ranks of the Democratic Party are not totally free of their own deplorables. […] For much of this campaign journalists have attacked Hillary Clinton for being evasive and avoiding hard questioning from their ranks. And then the second Clinton is forthright and says something revealing, she is attacked—not for the substance of what she’s said—but simply for having said it. This hypocrisy carries a chilling implicit message: Lie to me. Lie to the country. Lie to everyone. This weekend was not just another misanalysis, it was a shocking betrayal of the journalistic mission which should urge the revelation of truth as opposed to the propagation of hot takes, Washington jargon, and politics-speak. The shame reflects an ugly and lethal trend in this country’s history—an ever-present impulse to ignore and minimize racism, an aversion to calling it by its name.

But killing off links is a strategy. It may be presented as a cost-saving measure, or as a way of reducing the sharing of untrusted links. But it is a strategy, designed to keep people from the open web, the place where they can control how, and whether, someone makes money off of an audience. The web is where we can make sites that don’t abuse data in the ways that Facebook properties do.

The more we are able to accept the decay of the body after death, the easier it becomes to accept the decay of the body before death.

Kieran Hebden of Four Tet is a producer who puts the intelligence into Intelligent Dance Music. Two years ago, Keiran Hebden released his second album as Four Tet. Pause went on to feature in numerous critics' Top Tens of 2001, and Hebden was even credited with inventing a new musical genre, 'folktronica'. Topping that achievement was always going to be a challenge, but it's one he seems to have met with his new album. Its implausible but beautiful blend of fragile acoustic fragments, brutal beats and glitchy electronica has already garnered a rich crop of five-star reviews, and Rounds looks set to be every bit as influential as its predecessor.

In advance of the 2020 election, a guide to fighting viral fake news, disinformation, and simple misunderstandings across Twitter, Facebook, and the web. --- There’s a term called “context collapse” that’s very useful when discussing internet news. Popularized by scholar danah boyd, it describes how the internet “flattens multiple audiences into one” — if you’re browsing Twitter, for example, an offhand comment from your friend sits right alongside a statement from the president of the United States. Internet news suffers from its own variation of context collapse: no matter how far away or long ago a story happened, it can sound like it’s happening right now, in your neighborhood.

We don’t have to lose our digital public spaces to state manipulation. What if future companies designed media to facilitate democracy right from the beginning? Is it possible to create a form of digital communication that promotes consensus-building and civil debate, rather than divisiveness and conspiracy theories? […] Twitter and Facebook executives often say that their services are modeled on a “public square.” But the public square is more like 1970s network television, where one person at a time addresses the masses. On social media, the “square” is more like millions of karaoke boxes running in parallel, where groups of people are singing lyrics that none of the other boxes can hear. And many members of the “public” are actually artificial beings controlled by hidden individuals or organizations. There isn’t a decent real-world analogue for social media, and that makes it difficult for users to understand where public information is coming from, and where their personal information is going. […] The legacy of social media will be a world thirsty for new kinds of public experiences. To rebuild the public sphere, we’ll need to use what we’ve learned from billion-dollar social experiments like Facebook, and marginalized communities like Black Twitter. We’ll have to carve out genuinely private spaces too, curated by people we know and trust.

• Enjoy yourself • To err is human • Technical difficulties • Practice all the names • Know more than the speaker’s bio • Avoid in-jokes • Don't assume or rely on speaker’s fame • Announce and thank people with vigor • Let the speakers give the talks • Prep speakers for questions and answers • Housekeeping is a good boilerplate • Ask the organizers what they need

wikiHow embodies an alternative history of the internet, and an interesting possibility for its future. --- “The web offers us an opportunity to build whatever we want. We’ve chosen, by the way we’ve put the incentives, and the way users behaved, to spend all of our time in four big web properties,” Herrick tells me. “We didn’t have to do that, and we still don’t have to do that. We can build this web of small towns. You can get your information from small providers that have your best interests at heart and aren’t trying to just mine you for data. The web could be a totally different place.”

Meditation is a simple practice available to all, which can reduce stress, increase calmness and clarity and promote happiness. Learning how to meditate is straightforward, and the benefits can come quickly. […] Remember, the purpose of meditation isn’t to achieve perfect control over your mind or stop thinking altogether. The intention should be to bring a more compassionate, calm and accepting approach to whatever happens.

Amazon sellers often buy goods from Walmart and Target to resell on the platform, but the products need to be repackaged before being sent in. This has given rise to an industry of Amazon "preppers," often located in no-sales-tax states.