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I've had guns pulled on me by four people under Central Mississippi skies — once by a white undercover cop, once by a young brother trying to rob me for the leftovers of a weak work-study check, once by my mother and twice by myself. Not sure how or if I've helped many folks say yes to life but I've definitely aided in few folks dying slowly in America, all without the aid of a gun.

And we won’t kick ourselves for having bugs in the software, or for not being compliant enough with the technical preferences of a small, geeky crowd. We will regret if we just give power to ourselves and to the existing institutions again.

There are jailed dissenters around the world, with harsher sentences for lesser crimes, wasting in silence. We shouldn’t forget them and we shouldn’t forget the message Pussy Riot was trying to spread. However, we should let rebellion and reform grow organically from within a country and then foster and support it with an outsider’s perspective; we shouldn’t place ourselves and our lives and our Twitter feeds directly into someone else’s story and someone else’s struggle. If it’s not about you, don’t make it about you.

This entire debacle should be a reminder to the world why a secular society isn't just a lark or some unbearable burden on religious people who want to nose around in their employees' sex lives. A subset of religious people will always claim that their faith requires them to silence dissent and impose their values on others through government force, but we cannot be afraid to stand up to them, no matter how loudly they squall about having their feelings hurt. The Pussy Riot travesty is the logical end result of giving special legal consideration and privileges to religion.

Breaking down the Amanda Palmer and her crowdsourced-musicians situation.

When a voiceover artist temporarily loses the use of her primary asset, the struggle back to speaking unearths what’s gone unsaid for too long.

This website is designed as a social mirror to show the prevalence of casual homophobia in our society. Words and phrases like “faggot,” “dyke,” “no homo,” and “so gay” are used casually in everyday language, despite promoting the continued alienation, isolation and — in some tragic cases — suicide of sexual and gender minority (LGBTQ) youth.

The idea of it — their liberty vs. my need to be gratefully, soberly escorted by virtue of my sex — enraged me. In fact, we should all be enraged, every moment of every day, in a way that words can never express.

how to speed up Apple’s Mail.app by vacuuming the SQLite3 index sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Envelope Index vacuum;

This is supposed to be funny and fascinating, but I find it mostly sad. These people don’t need snark, they need mental health care.

Cynicism is more or less the act of giving in to one’s basest insecurities and fears—or buying into those of others, it’s inherently dialogical, as is everything IMO—and letting them guide your actions. In other words, everything gets filtered through the “ugh” and “siiiigh” filters, and it’s impossible for one to do most anything productive when buried waist-deep in that sort of shit. You’re consistently pushing outward at ostensibly negative forces that are collapsing in on you, and you’re wiring your brain to think that this is the only way of doing things. Everything is always already bad.

Short/sweet/interesting.

Some good tips for getting started with Sublime Text 2 and using its many features.

My list of my 100 favorite albums from 1996-2011.

I have wanted to write about the dream pop trio Clones of the Queen for a while now, but have purposefully held off until their next album release. With their new EP, “Braided,” out now, it is by far high time.

This is an great interview because Nick is such an interesting and interested individual. Very insightful and humble.

EVERYONE has a lot of stuff to do because there IS a lot of stuff to do. Some of it is work. Some of it is hanging out with your family. Some of it is just laying on the couch reading a book.

In his new book, Mp3: The Meaning of a Format, McGill University professor Jonathan Sterne exhaustively and eloquently traces the history of the mp3 from the initial hearing model developed in Bell Labs to the current debates about piracy. As the author argues, each time we rip a CD to our hard drives, we're not only saving space in our living rooms or ensuring we have the appropriate gym soundtrack, but also reaffirming a fundamental idea about the limits of human perception.

I interviewed Jonathan Sterne for Pitchfork about his new book. While conducting the interview, I thought Pitchfork readers would like to know about how AT&T’s capitalistic policies in the 1910s and 1920s laid the groundwork for those compressed bits of data currently clogging their hard drives, and other gentle, science-laden facts about the mp3’s history. I was wrong. But not to worry! Here are the cut bits.

Awesome flash game.

Why he runs red lights. I choose my riding style mindful of my own safety and that of my neighbors, but also in pursuit of happiness. Uninterrupted motion, gliding silently and swiftly, is a joy.

From Honolulu’s Department of Information Technology, city/government data made publicly available for citizens to use and build apps around. Collaboration with Code for America in some cases. ‘Citizens Analyzing Numbers Discover Opportunity’

This is a thing I read at (and wrote specifically for) the Pitchfork Music Festival’s amazing Book Fort on Sunday. It is about being both a writer and a musician, and the overlapping attendant neuroses of both.

Ocean’s search was not for songs in a familiar language, but for a Rosetta stone, a key to making sense of the universal message.

My excursions make me better because it’s the only time I stop to really examine my process. I’m an adult with responsibilities, but fiddling will always be a priority.

They don’t show the product. They don’t explain the product. They make the target audience feel stupid. They make the Geniuses look like unsupportive know-it-alls. There’s no clear call to action.

The verb of my life is learning.

If you’re using Google Web Fonts on your websites, then there’s a very good chance that 1 in 5 visitors are seeing faux bold and italic versions of your fonts — even if you correctly selected and used all of the weights and styles. That’s because the implementation method recommended by Google Web Fonts doesn’t work with Internet Explorer 7 or 8.

You are entitled to be wrong, to feel embarrassed, to feel like a jerk, and to keep writing anyway.