Arianna Rebolini: Fighting For Hip-Hop in the Whitest City in America (Buzzfeed)
Portland, Ore., is known as a haven for progressive culture. So why does it seem like police consider rappers and their fans a threat to the city's specific brand of weird?
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Veteran local performer Cool Nutz, whose real name is Terrence Scott, says that to successfully grow a music career in Portland, rappers must proactively seek out dialogue with the powers that be. “[Portland] is not New York or L.A.,” he says, talking about creating a niche for hip-hop acts in an indie-rock market. Scott’s shows go smoothly, he says, when he takes care to talk to police, the OLCC, or the gang task force in advance of a show.
That the responsibility for opening that line of communication falls on him seems tiresome at best and probationary at worst, like a child checking in with parents to assure them he’s not doing anything bad. But Scott argues his proactive approach is both empowering and effective, a way to set others up for success. “It’s about the progression of the urban music scene. When the police come in one show it doesn’t just affect that one show; it affects what everybody does.”
The more Bong Joon-ho’s masterpiece is regarded, the more it seems to vanish in the spectacle of its acclaim.
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The emphasis on universality is achieved through a negation of the particular in a typical display of liberal chauvinism. Consequently, the more Bong Joon-ho’s masterpiece is regarded, the more it seems to vanish in the spectacle of its acclaim. Parasite has made history; never mind how history has made Parasite.
This is not a charge against any attempt to relate Parasite to other contexts. Bong’s social critique concerns the international conditions of globalized capitalism, but particular to Korea’s neoliberal and neocolonial present. Examining the film as a story of class in the neocolony shifts it from a decontextualized tale of rich and poor to one of compradors and the colonized. This lens takes Parasite from an allegory of “class conflict” to one of imperialism, and illuminates the film’s recurring motifs of English, militarization and appropriated Indigenous material culture.
[…]
The specter of war represented by Geun-sae and the space of the bunker are crucial to interpreting the film’s climax. The ongoing war in the Korean peninsula, sometimes called the Forgotten War, is often narrativized as “over” in a manner reminiscent of how the colonization of the Americas is regarded as complete. The recognition of either process as unfinished undermines the solvency of ruling class power, even as that power is sustained by an endless cycle of colonial violence. There is more than simple analogy at work here; there is a direct genealogy that links the US invasion of Korea to its invasions of Indigenous nations.
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Faced with the impossible situation of division and occupation, the only solution Ki-woo can imagine is rooted in the neoliberal ethos of hard work and constant striving. He pledges to miraculously become rich and buy the Parks’ house one day, so he can reunite with his father. Ki-woo’s solution is not only deeply unrealistic; it does not address the fundamental problem at hand. Even in this fantasy scenario, Ki-taek would still be contained in the house by a legal system that would seek his prosecution and imprisonment. The forces that created and upheld the Kim family’s separation would not be undone, merely adapted to. The class system and the war enabling it would continue unchanged. Bong’s final shot, which clarifies that the solution Ki-woo envisions is just a dream, seems to dare us to dream harder.
Media narratives that spin Parasite’s acclaim through the lens of liberal assimilation miss the mark; a Hollywood that is more open to Asians or other people of color is no more of a solution than Ki-woo’s dream of buying the house that imprisons his father. The promise of inclusion is a distraction from the wars that haunt Parasite, Korea and this continent. As I write this, Wet’suwet’en land defenders are protecting their unceded territory from an invasion by Canada, which seeks to steal land for the Coastal GasLink pipeline.
Molly Young: Why do corporations speak the way they do? (Vulture)
The pernicious spread of corporatespeak, or garbage language, as Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley calls this kind of talk. Garbage language permeates the ways we think of our jobs and shapes our identities as workers.
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In other words, to “parallel-path” is to do two things at once. That’s all. I thought there was something gorgeously and inadvertently candid about the phrase’s assumption that a person would ever not be doing more than one thing at a time in an office — its denial that the whole point of having an office job is to multitask ineffectively instead of single-tasking effectively. Why invent a term for what people were already forced to do? It was, in its fakery and puffery and lack of a reason to exist, the perfect corporate neologism.
[…]
But unlike garbage, which we contain in wastebaskets and landfills, the hideous nature of these words — their facility to warp and impede communication — is also their purpose. Garbage language permeates the ways we think of our jobs and shapes our identities as workers. It is obvious that the point is concealment; it is less obvious what so many of us are trying to hide.
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Our attraction to certain words surely reflects an inner yearning. Computer metaphors appeal to us because they imply futurism and hyperefficiency, while the language of self-empowerment hides a deeper anxiety about our relationship to work — a sense that what we’re doing may actually be trivial, that the reward of “free” snacks for cultural fealty is not an exchange that benefits us, that none of this was worth going into student debt for, and that we could be fired instantly for complaining on Slack about it. When we adopt words that connect us to a larger project — that simultaneously fold us into an institutional organism and insist on that institution’s worthiness — it is easier to pretend that our jobs are more interesting than they seem. Empowerment language is a self-marketing asset as much as anything else: a way of selling our jobs back to ourselves.
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One reason for the uptick in garbage language is exactly this sense of nonstop supervision. Employers can read emails and track keystrokes and monitor locations and clock the amount of time their employees spend noodling on Twitter. In an environment of constant auditing, it’s safer to use words that signify nothing and can be stretched to mean anything, just in case you’re caught and required to defend yourself.
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Usage peeves are always arbitrary and often depend as much on who is saying something as on what is being said. When Megan spoke about “business-critical asks” and “high-level integrated decks,” I heard “I am using meaningless words and forcing you to act like you understand them.” When an intern said the same thing, I heard someone heroically struggling to communicate in the local dialect. I hate certain words partly because of the people who use them; I can’t help but equate linguistic misdemeanors with crimes of the soul.
[…]
The meaningful threat of garbage language — the reason it is not just annoying but malevolent — is that it confirms delusion as an asset in the workplace.
Dave Simpson: A Renegade in Atlantic City (Popula)
The story of DJ Renegade: a poet, a mentor to Ta-Nehisi Coates, now a poker grinder in Atlantic City who lives on two-day comps at luxury hotels by keeping tables warm.
Cherie Hu: The Economics of 24/7 Lo-Fi Hip-Hop YouTube Livestreams
In this landscape — where songs are interchangeable, indistinguishable commodities, and artists are unrecognizable to the average ear — it’s arguably larger content aggregators and curators, not artists, who are at the top of the food chain. And now several companies, some with venture-capital funding behind them, are racing to claim their own share of the lo-fi aggregation market.
Jia Tolentino: The Age of Instagram Face (New Yorker)
How social media, FaceTune, and plastic surgery created a single, cyborgian look.
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Then the celebrity doctor came in, giving off the intensity of a surgeon and the focus of a glassblower. I said to him, too, that I was just interested in looking better, and wanted to know what an expert would recommend. I showed him one of my filtered Snapchat photos. He glanced at it, nodded, and said, “Let me show you what we could do.” He took a photo of my face on his phone and projected it onto a TV screen on the wall. “I like to use FaceTune,” he said, tapping and dragging.
Within a few seconds, my face was shaped to match the Snapchat photo. He took another picture of me, in profile, and FaceTuned the chin again. I had a heart-shaped face, and visible cheekbones. All of this was achievable, he said, with chin filler, cheek filler, and perhaps an ultrasound procedure that would dissolve the fat in the lower half of my cheeks—or we could use Botox to paralyze and shrink my masseter muscles.
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What did it mean, I wondered, that I have spent so much of my life attempting to perform well in circumstances where an unaltered female face is aberrant? How had I been changed by an era in which ordinary humans receive daily metrics that appear to quantify how our personalities and our physical selves are performing on the market? What was the logical end of this escalating back-and-forth between digital and physical improvement?
Music Journalism Insider #029: An Interview with Pitchfork's Reviews Editor
Todd L. Burns interviews Pitchfork Reviews Editor Jeremy D. Larson. A lot of really excellent advice in here.
Q: What's the best way to pitch an album review to Pitchfork?
Just email me; I will get back to you soonish. I like getting pitches from people who have an extensive background in writing music criticism, whether that’s at other outlets or on your own personal blog. It’s a bit of a different skill set than reporting or culture writing, and there are a few basics I like to see with new writers. I like reading people with a voice and would much rather read some fun thing you wrote on your Tumblr than a capsule review you wrote for a magazine or newspaper.
As a general note on pitching: Try to find a way to pitch with the voice that you write in. Show me who you are as a writer. I get a lot of pitches that are in this stiff, stilted, overly formal tone, which, I understand, writers want to be respectful to editors they don’t know. Don’t email me and be like “fam bam lemme do that Dungen live album cool?” but do find a middle ground. If you can come to me with an elevator pitch or some sort of key or flourish to unlock an album that is written in a way where I can see that I don’t have to spend a ton of time editing it, that is the best. Think of pitching as an audition—the director is very busy, they are watching a hundred people today alone, everybody can generally do the job just fine, things start to sound the same after a while, but they are looking for the person who can do the job like no one else and make their life the easiest. You have one minute to grab someone’s attention.
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Q: Describe your basic approach to editing a typical piece.
In general, I like making sure there is a beginning, a middle, and an end—they should all be braided together. The lede should be the best thing you’ve ever written. There should be value judgments; you’d be surprised how many drafts I’ve read that do not tell me whether a record is quite simply good or bad.
The best stuff should be at the top. Cut cliches, idioms, cut most adjectives and adverbs. I’m not a huge fan of reading how instruments sound, especially because it is very easy to simply listen to the album and hear it yourself, and describing a synth or guitar often leads to bad or boring writing.
I cut a lot of quoted lyrics—most lyrics pulled out of context don’t really offer much insight into the songwriter, or they fuel an argument that is straining for meaning, or sometimes the context is just plain wrong. Lots of drafts hem and haw or are very equivocal, so I try to eliminate crutch phrases and draft language such as “almost feels like” or “some fans will find” or “so it makes sense that,” things like that.
Also, the phrases “proves to be” or “finds himself” are vestiges of college newspaper writing and sound wretched, just use “is” or activate the sentence. What’s left I send it back to the writer, to address the edits and make sure they are happy with the final copy.
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It’s easy to glom onto an artist’s massive audience and cruise in their wake, but there is a better audience, a smarter and more attractive audience, who cares deeply about what a critic and a journalist think. Write for them.
The makers of the Cristal Baschet glass musical instrument. I must visit this place in France!
The Baschet Sound Structures Association’s mission is to ensure the work of the Baschet brothers lives on.
Lauren Dragan: Your Wireless Earbuds Are Trash (Eventually) (Wirecutter)
When you realize that the $200 earbuds you love may last you only three years with daily use, it can feel like a punch to the gut. Then again, with the progression of technology, many people have grown accustomed to the obsolescence of their gear. They accept that phones and laptops aren’t lifelong purchases. For headphone lovers like me, the value per year of regular use may seem worth the purchase price.
But what’s eating at me is the environmental impact. Very often, people just drop broken earbuds into the trash (which you shouldn’t do, as it could lead to a literal trash fire). And even those who endeavor to recycle properly may find that the system they trust to reduce and reuse is deeply flawed. A 2017 United Nations Global E-waste Monitor report (PDF) stated that, of the world’s nearly 45 million metric tons of e-waste, only 20 percent was recycled through proper channels. Many “recyclers” ship the e-waste abroad, where much of it isn’t truly recycled. A small amount of usable parts might be repurposed, and valuable minerals are extracted, but this process has negative environmental impacts of its own. The prevailing methods can lead to unsafe conditions for workers and the surrounding areas. For example, the process for recovering gold (which is commonly used in electronics due to its conductive abilities) involves “bathing circuit boards in nitric and hydrochloric acid, thus poisoning waterways and communities.” Whatever is not deemed useful is dumped in the ground.
Marc Weidenbaum: Join a Cellular Chorus (Disquiet)
Featuring Patricia Wolf’s new project that turns any device with a web browser and speakers into a piece of a larger sound art.
Every time you invoke the Cellular Chorus page, a random audio file will be set as the browser’s default. (There are currently 64 different audio files in all.) Then let them play, all of them at once. Move the devices around the room. Don’t let any single device take prominence. Adjust the volume accordingly. Use the pulldown menu or the forward/back buttons to alternate between tracks. Note how the same file will sound different on your rattly old tablet than it does on your brand new laptop, how your humble kitchen speaker can’t hold a candle to your bleeding-edge smartphone.
Franklin Foer: The Differences Between Warren and Sanders Matter (The Atlantic)
If Warren wanted to define herself in opposition to Sanders, she wouldn’t need to tie herself in knots. Where Sanders talks about revolution, her description of the American economy amounts to a restoration. She wants to return to another era, when the economy (and government) was less captured by Big Business. Her scourge is corruption, and embedded in her incessant denunciations of it is the hope that the system can be salvaged by extrication of that tumor. Where socialism imagines greater concentrations of power—greater state planning, greater public provisioning of goods—her vision ultimately points in the direction of a more decentralized, more competitive economy. Sanders’s keyword is equality; her best speeches have extolled liberty.
By contrasting herself with Sanders, she could press the case for her electability. Donald Trump has already begun to portray socialism as a foreign incursion, but Warren’s populism is in the American grain. It draws on a political vocabulary that traces back to Thomas Jefferson. She wants “structural change,” but her changes are premised on principles that are deeply familiar.
CIVIC Platform is a technology environment that makes institutional data more accessible, enabling creative applications and analysis.
We connect resources and a nationwide network of collaborators with complex information challenges in the public interest to build projects on CIVIC’s open technology frameworks.
Our vision is for public data to be available as a vital resource for collaboration and group problem solving -- accessible programatically, in common formats, with excellent documentation, using secure and reliable technology.
The technology is only part of the challenge. Custodians of this data in government, nonprofit, and academia face barriers of limited funding, access to talent, and unique compliance.
We’re building the teams and systems to make it happen.
Kaia Sand: City efforts should lead to health and housing, not more suffering (Street Roots)
It’s easy to see poor people living in public spaces and the trash that accumulates, but this is a particular way of considering impact on public spaces, with a singular disregard for the punitive nature in taking away people’s belongings because they don’t have a home to hide them in. If it’s just about trash — we know how to get rid of trash.
So I ask the mayor: if ending homelessness is a defining problem of our city, shouldn’t we demand that everything that impacts the lives of unhoused people also support health and housing?
To do anything less is to fall short on vision.
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Navigation teams have been sent to nine camps out of approximately 3,000 camps that have been swept.
A more constructive system would send these navigation teams or other outreach workers to build possibilities with unhoused people every single time city is about to destroy their living space. Every single time.
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People need legal places to sleep. And many people actually would be well-served having nearby land to at least camp. A federal appeals court has upheld that it is inhumane to break down active camps without places for people to go.
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A policy entirely driven by complaining is destructive to our city when, in fact, many people in this city want to help. If a private entity wants to open space for camping, fast track this.
In fact, staff at HUCIRP has been thinking along these lines, putting together a program for hygiene trailers. If your organization might be able to host one, I urge you to apply. I would like this program to be widely successful, but people need to know that this is possible.
Helen Hill: The last supper at Sunnyside Community House (Street Roots)
Schwiebert, Mayer, the solid core of volunteers, and the hundreds of poor and marginalized people who have come to rely on the Sunnyside Community House are determined not to lose the special community they have built together over the last 38 years.
“We will do what we have to do in a mobile way. We will do one-on-one support. We will find a place where we can have meetings once a week with our people. We will try to orchestrate pop-up meals and community spaces that will let us have one-offs until we can raise enough money or find a space that will open for us,” Mayer said.
Mayer has created a new website using the groups new name, beaconpdx.org. All donations will go through Metanoia, the nonprofit Methodist congregation to which Schwiebert, her husband and Peace House all belong.
But for now, a legion of helpers are rushing against the clock to fill storage units around the city with load after load of bunk beds, kitchen equipment, tablecloths, blankets, holiday decorations, canned food and a barber chair in hopes of one day having a home again.
“The work is not done,” Schwiebert said, “and I’m not done with the work.”
Justin Elliott & Paul Kiel: Inside TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans From Filing Their Taxes for Free (ProPublica)
Using lobbying, the revolving door and “dark pattern” customer tricks, Intuit fended off the government’s attempts to make tax filing free and easy, and created its multi-billion-dollar franchise.
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By 2019, nearly 40% of U.S. taxpayers filed online and some 40 million of them did so with TurboTax, far more than with any other product.
But the success of TurboTax rests on a shaky foundation, one that could collapse overnight if the U.S. government did what most wealthy countries did long ago and made tax filing simple and free for most citizens.
For more than 20 years, Intuit has waged a sophisticated, sometimes covert war to prevent the government from doing just that, according to internal company and IRS documents and interviews with insiders. The company unleashed a battalion of lobbyists and hired top officials from the agency that regulates it. From the beginning, Intuit recognized that its success depended on two parallel missions: stoking innovation in Silicon Valley while stifling it in Washington.
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Intuit knows it’s deceiving its customers, internal company documents obtained by ProPublica show. “The website lists Free, Free, Free and the customers are assuming their return will be free,” said a company PowerPoint presentation that reported the results of an analysis of customer calls this year. “Customers are getting upset.”
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The industry would offer free tax prep to a larger portion of taxpayers. In exchange, the IRS would promise not to develop its own system.
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Free File only required the companies to offer free federal returns. They could charge for other products. The state return was the most common, but they could also pitch loans, “audit defense” or even products that had nothing to do with taxes.
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Frequently “free” didn’t mean free at all. Many who started in TurboTax Free Edition found that if their return required certain commonplace tax forms, they would have to upgrade to a paid edition in order to file.
The company came to a key insight: Americans’ anxiety around tax filing is so powerful that it usually trumps any frustration with the TurboTax product, according to three former Intuit staffers. So even if customers click on “free” and are ultimately asked to pay, they will usually do it rather than start the entire process anew. Intuit capitalized on this tendency by making sure the paywall popped up only when the taxpayer was deep into the filing process.
“There’s a lot of desperation — people will agree, will click, will do anything to file,” said a former longtime software developer.
Every fall before tax season, the company puts every aspect of the TurboTax homepage and filing process through rigorous user testing. Design decisions down to color, word choice and other features are picked to maximize how many customers pay, regardless if they are eligible for the free product. “Dark patterns are something that are spoken of with pride and encouraged in design all hands” meetings, said one former designer.
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Another celebrated feature, former staffers said, were the animations that appear as TurboTax users prepare their returns. One shows icons representing different tax deductions scrolling by, while another, at the end of the process, shows paper tax forms being scanned line-by-line and the phrase “Let’s comb through your returns.” What users are not told is that these cartoons reflect no actual processing or calculations; rather, Intuit’s designers deliberately added these delays to both reinforce and ease users’ “Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.” The animations emphasize that taxes are complicated but also reassure users that the technological wizardry of TurboTax will protect them from mistakes.
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Another celebrated feature, former staffers said, were the animations that appear as TurboTax users prepare their returns. One shows icons representing different tax deductions scrolling by, while another, at the end of the process, shows paper tax forms being scanned line-by-line and the phrase “Let’s comb through your returns.” What users are not told is that these cartoons reflect no actual processing or calculations; rather, Intuit’s designers deliberately added these delays to both reinforce and ease users’ “Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.” The animations emphasize that taxes are complicated but also reassure users that the technological wizardry of TurboTax will protect them from mistakes.
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Barack Obama, then a candidate for president, took aim at the tax prep industry. In a speech to an audience of tax wonks in Washington, he promised that the IRS would establish a simple return system. “This means no more worry, no more waste of time, no more extra expense for a tax preparer,” he declared. […] In response to the Obama threat, McKay and Intuit’s small army of outside lobbyists turned to Congress, where lawmakers friendly to the company introduced a series of bills that would elevate Free File from a temporary deal with the IRS to the law of the land.
Republicans have historically been the company’s most reliable supporters, but some Democrats joined them. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, the California Democrat whose district includes part of Silicon Valley, has introduced or co-sponsored five bills over the years that would codify the Free File program, with names like the Free File Permanence Act.
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What is clear is that Intuit’s business relies on keeping the use of Free File low. The company has repeatedly declined to say how many of its paying customers are eligible for the program, which is currently open to anyone who makes under $66,000. But based on publicly available data and statements by Intuit executives, ProPublica estimates that roughly 15 million paying TurboTax customers could have filed for free if they found Free File. That represents more than $1.5 billion in estimated revenue, or more than half the total that TurboTax generates. Those affected include retirees, students, people on disability and minimum-wage workers.
Nathalie Lawhead: The wonderful world of tools made by small teams, solo-devs, and shareware (weird, beautiful, and experimental things to be creative in + an analysis on building for approachability)
Since starting development on the Electric Zine Maker I’ve been hoarding links to interesting, unusual, strange, small, or just cute tools. This has grown to be a strong area of interest as I’ve been diving into what even makes a tool approachable… How much experimental UI or humor is too much? Do people even want tools that are goofy? What else is out there from creators making small and interesting tools that solve a variety of creative problems?
It's clear upon inspection that the media narrative about an influx of Russian or otherwise foreign bots influencing politics in America is built on flimsy data and enormous leaps of logic. Further, the narrative empowers conspiracy theorists to make essentially whatever claims they want about anyone. The bots that do exist are drops of water in the ocean of social media, but I believe that the effect of constant front-page news stirring up fear about foreign influence can have far-reaching negative effects on any democracy.
Anupa Mistry: Grimes — Miss Anthropocene (Pitchfork)
I’m not very into this album but this review absolutely nails it.
Grimes’ first project as a bona fide pop star is more morose than her previous work, but no less camp. Her genuineness shines through the album’s convoluted narrative, and the songs are among her finest.
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So much about the actual music of Miss Anthropocene succeeds that the choice to bury it below a warped—and yes, misanthropic—concept about “The Environment” makes it hard to connect with who Grimes is as an artist today. Standing in the way of humans reckoning with climate emergency are multiple delusions: that wealth brings freedom, that boundless acquisition and unchecked growth remain tenable, and that political and economic institutions are inherently trustworthy actors. Grimes sounds like the pop star she’s worked very hard to become, but her imagination seems diminished—or, like many of her celebrity ilk, is cordoned off in a bubble floating above the rest of humanity. In 2020, revolutionary pop stardom might try to clarify, rather than obscure, the havoc that systems wreak when it comes to, say, gender roles and social compliance, technology and surveillance capitalism, nationalism and land exploitation, or whiteness and pathological denial.
Travis Almand: A Guide to Console Commands (CSS Tricks)
This guide covers what’s available in the console object of Firefox and Chrome as they are often the most popular browsers for development and they do have a few differences in various aspects of the console. The new Chromium-based Edge is essentially the same as Chrome in many ways so, in most cases, the console commands will operate much the same.
Laura Snapes: Pop star, producer or pariah? The conflicted brilliance of Grimes (The Guardian)
Boucher has recently seemed at a loss to regain control over her career, and naive about her role in its dissolution. But Miss Anthropocene reveals an astute understanding – evidently well honed – of humanity’s worst impulses and how to appeal to them.
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Against all odds, Miss Anthropocene is a beautiful and emotionally complex album: Boucher’s continuing personal testament to creativity as resistance against destruction, and an unlikely optimistic gesture that still believes art can be a powerful force for social good. It also finally finds Boucher reconciled to her relationship with the public. On Miss Anthropocene, she is a mirror, inviting us to examine the source of our bad faith.
Lindsay Zoladz: Buffy Sainte-Marie — Illuminations (Pitchfork)
The ability to harness new technology, of course, is a mighty power. That Buffy Sainte-Marie was using synthesizers and quadraphonic sound to upend conventional narratives about North American colonialism only made her more terrifying to the status quo. Perhaps that is why she has continued to make her life’s work bringing computers and digital technology to indigenous communities, as she has done with her Cradleboard Teaching Project or her 1999 manifesto “Cyberskins.” Emerging technology, she writes, can “counterbalance past misinterpretations with positive realities, and past exploitations with future opportunities. The reality of the situation is that [indigenous people] are not all dead and stuffed in some museum with the dinosaurs: we are here in this digital age.”
Fifty years ago, Illuminations was a declaration of that same life-affirming truth, and so it remains. It’s a portal to another world, as full of possibilities and alternative realities as that telephone-switchboard-like matrix into which Sainte-Marie plugged cord after cord. Lay down your cool cynicism, your rationality, your linear Western thinking, Illuminations instructs, before leaning close to whisper its secret: “Magic is alive.”
Ganda Suthivarakom: What to Do If You Think Your Amazon Purchase Is a Fake (Wirecutter)
It’s easier than ever before to mistakenly buy a counterfeit or knockoff product online. Here’s what to do when it happens to you.
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1. Stop using the thing
2. Write to the seller
3. File an 'A-to-z Guarantee' claim
4. Contact your credit card company
5. Write to the brand
6. Leave feedback for the seller
7. Replace what you have by finding an authorized seller
See also:
https://thewirecutter.com/blog/myths-about-counterfeit-products-debunked/
https://thewirecutter.com/blog/amazon-counterfeit-fake-products/
Colin Spacetwinks: The Pious World of Christian Sonic the Hedgehog Fan Art (New York Magazine)
Sonic exists right on the edge of “family-friendly” and “edgy as heck,” making him a potent figure for Christian youth.
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Sonic the Hedgehog is the most perfectly crafted piece of pop culture to pull into the Christian youth demographic. In the ’90s, Sonic the Hedgehog was legitimately cool. There is also nothing immediately objectionable about his existence. He’s made of bright colors and a family-friendly design with poppy music with no lyrics to be misconstrued as corrupting.
[…]
More than even Mario, more than Crash Bandicoot and Spyro, more than Bubsy and dozens of others, Sonic is perfectly made for the whole of the internet and all the groups milling about on it.
The blue blur is a smirking spiny mammal who somehow looks just as comfortable next to a quote from the Book of Revelations as he does in an Impact-font meme declaring “KISS MY ASS, DUANE.”
And God bless that hedgehog for it.
Tom Breihan: The Number Ones: Blondie’s “Heart Of Glass” (Stereogum)
Chapman and Blondie also used plenty of other little tricks on “Heart Of Glass”: digital reverb, multi-tracked guitars, echo machines, a Minimoog, Chapman’s own backing vocals. It’s a beautiful piece of recording, all these sticky and hazy interlocking pieces combining together into a sighing, rippling landscape. Parts of it — Clem Burke’s lockstep drums, Nigel Harrison’s funky and vaguely Chic-esque bass-pops — sound truly disco. Other parts sound like rockers in an expensive studio attempting to figure out how the Giorgio Moroder magic was made. The whole thing glimmers and flutters and fades like a mirage on the horizon. It’s beautiful.
Meow Analytics is very light and only adds the Google Analytics code to your website. That’s it! If you are tired all those Google Analytics related plugins trying to do too much and forcing you to subscribe to something you do not want, you will love it. Meow Analytics can display some of your analytics data as well. In this case, this access will be only between your WordPress and Google Analytics.