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Affordable Art Prints

Portraits of 200 friends. A creative collaboration. Monotypes by Adam Funari. Photographs by Michael Keany.

Better to listen to music that alternates between disquiet and devastation, over and over, with no respite. Anything else feels like a lie.

On the bright side, by interpreting the confusing policy in the most alarming possible light, the tech press has forced Instagram to toe the line more carefully than it otherwise might have. That's a win for users

I am a sucker for this shit.

EmilyKun from the Hatventures Minecraft server drew this picture of herself, Siejo82, and me exploding from a giant sakura tree that I filled with TNT and then lit too soon.

Designed by Adam Whitcroft. A lovingly designed and crafted suite of 300 icons for web and user interface design.

The new focus is to create a distributed network of wifi locations, each running an instance of the forum software, each serving those in its immediate vicinity. The content from one location’s forum can also migrate to other locations through a syncing mechanism that takes advantage of users moving from node to node. The long term goal is to deploy a broad network of wifi hardware running the Occupy.here software. In the short term the focus is limited to deploying the network throughout New York City in a number of locations to be determined.

I don't think the issue is irony. I think that the issue is the cult of the trivial. And it only matters insofar as it makes people feel better or worse. I have observed that many people spend an inordinate amount of their lives devoting obsessive attention to subjects while simultaneously working to demonstrate that they don't take those subjects at all seriously. Not just that they don't take them seriously but that they couldn't possibly. This tends to be expressed in a tone that we typically identify as ironic, but I doesn't have to be, and the focus on irony misses the essential point. I think that people need a sense of narrative in their life, they need self-belief, they need to feel like their life stands for something. And I genuinely believe that the way a lot of people spend the majority of their time-- electronically mediated, participating in a constant digital conversation about whatever has captured the mass attention, and making fun of absolutely everything about it-- is just deadening of any sense of purpose or deeper meaning.

Damon Krukowski of Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi breaks down the meager royalties currently being paid out to bands by streaming services and explains what the music business' headlong quest for capital means for artists today.

Our staff marks the 30th anniversary of the compact disc with stories of second-hand triumphs, pesky scratches, insidious CD burning schemes, and more.

On the NPR intern Emily White and Amanda Palmer and their internet infamy this summer.

Al Rotches on Cranking Out Web Units for the President's Re-Election Bid. I built the website portfolio for these ads!

This is a depressing read. One girl’s account of being sexually harassed after a Das Racist show and the Tumblr followups reveal more of the same. Both times DR played in Hawaii, they were wasted before the first song. What a bunch of assholes.

I would challenge the idea that trolls, and trolls alone, are why we can't have nice things online. There is no doubt that trolls are disruptive, and there is no doubt that trolls can make life very difficult. That said, trolling behaviors signify much more than individual pathology. They are directly reflective of the culture out of which they emerge, immediately complicating knee-jerk condemnations of the entire behavioral category. Until the conversation is directed towards the institutional incubators out of which trolling emerges -- as opposed to just the trolls themselves -- no ground will be gained, and no solutions reached.

The solution to the growing global food crisis will not be technical; it will be social and political. The Oxfam report offers a good start: The World Bank, which operates under the leadership of a president chosen by the US, should stop financing dodgy land deals in the global south—as it has been doing—and start advising the governments of low-income, food-insecure countries to set up strict protections for smallholder farmers. Further, Oxfam advises, the World Bank should cajole low-income nations to insist that any land deals be structured to ensure that local food security is enhanced by them.

‘Internet addiction’ doesn’t exist. It can’t, because it’s a logical impossibility, a category error, and there’s no good evidence that heavy internet use, in itself, is a risk to mental health.

I’m sure you’ve heard the expression ‘everyone is entitled to their opinion.’ Perhaps you’ve even said it yourself, maybe to head off an argument or bring one to a close. Well, as soon as you walk into this room, it’s no longer true. You are not entitled to your opinion. You are only entitled to what you can argue for.

Maybe the indie experiment only existed to create Grimes, the ultimate internet content producer who makes content directly aimed at internet viewers. She is the best example of ‘not being a band/musician’, but instead a ‘playing by the rules’ content generation machine that resonates with humans wasting time on the internet.

COTQ is featured here.

A schoolgirl and a former traveling Bible salesman helped turn deodorants and antiperspirants from niche toiletries into an $18 billion industry.

…the notion of indie exceptionalism (and its white, urban, and upper-class trappings) was repeatedly questioned this year, almost always by the very people who benefit from it. Indie-ness in 2012's pop culture has been depicted as an outmoded cliché, an indulgence for the rich and deluded, a jokey lyrical reference, a house of cards, and/or a pile of cool clothes for pop stars and corporations to try on and discard.

Recently I was approached by a newspaper reporter (who shall remain nameless) about a possible article on trolling. I agreed under the condition that I could talk about the importance of defining one’s terms. I was also asked to put the reporter in touch with a troll. I asked “Brian Macnamara,” who sometimes trolls under the name Paulie Socash (further info on Paulie here). In the end, the paper wasn’t able to run the piece (perhaps unsurprisingly, given Brian’s responses), but I asked for permission to post both sets of answers.

We’ve all been on nightmarish dates. The problem is that there is a flatness to “Louie’s” women that suggests their creator is woefully out of touch. Maybe in some roundabout way that is what he wants. When a character played by Chloe Sevigny works herself to orgasm at a coffee shop in a recent episode, Louie looks at the barista and kind of shrugs helplessly as if to say, Poor me, I had no part in this. Which is frustrating, as he’s the one writing the script.

the mortality benefit of mammography is much smaller, and the harm of overdiagnosis much larger, than has been previously recognized.

Compilation on which my Welwing song ‘Leaving’ was included.

Lester Bangs was a wreck of a man, right up until his death in April of 1982, at the age of thirty-three. He also had the most advanced and exquisite taste…

what has made us all anxious about truth and accuracy in personal narrative is not so much the published memoirs that turn out to be false or exaggerated, which has often been the case, historically, but rather the unprecedented explosion of personal writing (and inaccuracy and falsehood) online, in Web sites and blogs and anonymous commentary—forums where there are no editors and fact-checkers and publishers to point an accusing finger at.

Wherein Rob Delaney makes the case for universal health care better than the Obama campaign. I am of the opinion, as a dad, a husband (of a woman with reproductive organs), a tax payer, a voter and an American living inside a human body, that improving the mechanisms for delivering health care in this nation is as high a priority as we will ever have. Why? When you unshackle good, hard-working, kind, enterprising Americans from the fear that health care costs could bankrupt them, you will unleash an intellectual and economic force that will knock your socks right off your feet, whether you bought them at Brooks Brothers or Goodwill.

Following Hurricane Sandy’s destructive tear through the Northeast this week, the nation’s 300 million citizens looked upon the trail of devastation and fully realized, for the first time, that this is just going to be something that happens from now on.